The Wit and Wisdom of James D. Watson

Quotes from the co-discoverer of DNA.

From Esquire in 2007:

James Watson: What I’ve Learned

Scientist, 78, Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

By John H. Richardson Published: Oct 19, 2007

Never fight bigger boys or dogs.

The cost of DNA sequencing is going to change the world much faster than I would have thought. We can resequence someone now for $150,000. Can you reach the $1,000 genome? I’m skeptical of that. But just $15,000 would change the world. You’d do a thousand Greeks and a thousand Swedes and find out what’s different about them. Anytime a child has problems at school or something where you worry something is wrong, you’ll do a DNA diagnosis.

That happened.

I’ve given my DNA to two of these companies. I’ve told them they can publish everything except the structure of the gene that will tell me if I’m predisposed to Alzheimer’s. I don’t want to know.

As it turned out, it would have been more merciful for Watson to come down with Alzheimer’s so he would have been unaware of the ignorant hatred directed at him in his last 18 years by The Establishment.

New ideas require new facts.

You explain things by way of ideas. Why do we have a government that is run by rich trash? Because they’ve used their money to buy the presidency. Bush is a tool for the people who don’t want an inheritance tax. And Frist [Republican Senate majority leader] isn’t an innocent bystander, with his own family fortune -- hundreds of millions. The piece of shit, I hate him.

Watson grew up in a Chicago Democratic family in the South Shore neighborhood and hated Republicans.

For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.

I’m basically a libertarian. I don’t want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it’s going to harm me. I don’t want to pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It’s just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we’re going to have different aspirations. The things that will satisfy me won’t satisfy you. On the other hand, if global warming is in any way preventable and it’s likely to come, not doing something would be irresponsible to the future of our society.

Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified.

Watson’s mother was half Irish and half Scottish. He was making a statement of general principles:

If you can’t be criticized, that’s very dangerous.

The whole Larry Summers thing, to say that men are a bit strange and their strangest quality is their ability to understand mathematics -- you’re not supposed to even think it.

I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.

Watson’s son suffered from schizophrenia. He felt that wasn’t the fault of his parenting.

I’ve wondered why people aren’t more intelligent. Why isn’t everyone as intelligent as Ashkenazi Jews? And it may be that societies work best when there’s a mixture of abilities -- the bright people would never be an army. Or has our intelligence been limited by leaders killing off any potential competitors? I suspect time is not a factor. The Ashkenazi Jews have done it in a thousand years.

This appears to be a reference to the Cochran-Harpending theory of Ashkenazi intelligence.

So these are the sorts of things we’ll find out -- how many mutations would you need to be more intelligent?

2007 was back during the Small Number of Genes of Large Effect era.

I went to a meeting on genetic enhancement in New York City, and a few of us were for it. The rest were appalled. To me, that’s just a defensive reaction of people on the top -- they’re afraid someone else might be on the top. But what if you were really dumb? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a child who would let you get out of the slums? If you could make people with ten-point-higher IQs, we’d probably have fewer wars.

Francis Crick said we should pay poor people not to have children.

Francis Crick (1916-2004), who was named after Francis Galton, was perhaps an even more fervent IQ race realist than Watson, as I documented here from Crick’s letters to leading scientists in which Crick denounced attempts to cancel Arthur Jensen. Crick, however, had the good sense to die the year before the Larry Summers hoopla made cancellation “a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend,” so Crick’s reputation lives on.

I think now we’re in a terrible situation where we should pay the rich people to have children. If there is any correlation between success and genes, IQ will fall if the successful people don’t have children. These are self-obvious facts.

On the other hand, the big change between 2007 and 2025, at least in America, is that…

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