How did you know that I'm a 5'6" redhead?

I've seen so many of these "studies" or "revelations", that I hesitate to even rebuke or point out flaws in the arguments.
I belong to another popular forum for skeptics and there every now and then someone will come with the latest and greatest (back of envelop) research which prove this or that relating to this or that group/culture/race/ethnic/OS being superior to the rest (I made up the OS part....OS->Operating System).
I use to get ticked and spend hours looking-up papers and web links to refute/rebuke the posters, but I've learned that stereotype and upbringing issue are hard to remedy over the web. Now I read, giggle a bit and carry on with my life.

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This whole internet thing is probably not a passing fad.-Ronald Brak
While speech might be free, consequences cost.-Doodler

Here is an essay on the heritability and Malleability of IQ by a smart person. It's quite long, but its a pretty exhaustive coverage and applicable to this thread.

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

And here is a link to a shorter, pithier article directly concerning Watson and his unsupported remarks. I urge viewer disgression as it contains a three letter word for bottom that begins with the letter A and so may be too shocking for some readers:

http://gregladen.com/wordpress/?p=1535

I must admit its the first time I heard of Dr.Watson, he doesn't sound like someone who should be taken seriously.
I am not sure whether he is a mor....n or maybe he ill. Maybe hes got some funny strain of the foot in mouth condition.
At first I was worried that a purported intellectual has said some unfortunate things but now I am convinced....we are dealing with an idi..t.

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This whole internet thing is probably not a passing fad.-Ronald Brak
While speech might be free, consequences cost.-Doodler

This would be a minor thing, except that Watson happens to be one of the people (with Francis Crick) who discovered DNA. . .

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As above, so below

Hmm, considering you know nothing about me I think it's a little presumptious to slate me as a scientific bigot.

I say it is madness not because of what Dr Watson claims, but more the manner of his claims, particularly:

That doesn't sound like rational discussion to me; it sounds like somebody trying to use science to justify their already existing prejudices. That, from somebody so respected and accomplished in the scientific world, suprises me to say the least, particularly on such sensative ground as this.

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"Bessie Braddock to Churchill "Winston, your drunk!"
Churchill: "Bessie, you're ugly, and tomorrow morning I shall be sober""
the solar system

I, for one, am a racist. I just LOVE races [can hardly wait for the Brazilian F1 GP on sunday - oh, and a very smart afro guy is likely going to take it all]

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"As truth is gathered, I rearrange,
Inside out, outside in - Perpetual change." - A British rock band

Biotechnology does not fall within my competences, I am not well versed on the "giants" of biotechnology.
I found out about the DNA discovery on the link I quoted above and reading some of the post here.
In mentioning that I was not familiar with his name does not diminish his work on the discovery of DNA.
In another thread here there is a story about an astronaut who believes that we've met ET already---- meaning you can still be smart but say/believe the darnest things.

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This whole internet thing is probably not a passing fad.-Ronald Brak
While speech might be free, consequences cost.-Doodler

Some questions people just don't want to know the answers too. I think this would be one of them. I read the book "Next" by Michael Crichton - which is an interesting take on the some of the consequences of knowing too much about DNA and genetics. Heck - I'm living with it. Life at home isn't too pleasant when you find out something is hereditary when you were convinced it wasn't. I was the only one in my family (I'm talking grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, 2nd cousins, etc.) with a particular defect and was certain it was about as fluke as having 6 fingers on one hand. You pass the trait on and your spouse hates you for it and is convinced there is no way you didn't know.

I can see a future where heredity and genetic predisposition will be used against people more and more. It isn't pretty.

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

People already do that to each other about inherited wealth or property; my mother and her sister haven't spoken to each other in years, due to a fight started over my grandmother's house-- which neither now owns, and which has probably been torn down by its new owners for all we know. But the grudge and its scars live on.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

In my humble opinion, an "ism" be it racism or sexism, is when you apply to an individual, a prejudice that may in fact be true for the group.

For example, if you were to graph upper body strength of males and females you would get two bell curves. The male's curve would be shifted a bit to the right. What that means is that as a group, males have more upper body strength than females. It is NOT sexist, in my opinion, to make that statement.

However, if I tell an individual woman, "sorry but you can't be a firefighter because you're a woman and therefore you aren't strong enough" then that is sexism, in my opinion. Everyone should have equal rights and equal opportunity regardless of their group identity.

The story in the OP is interesting to me, because it illustrates an important point which I've been thinking about for some time, but had trouble expressing.

There is no scientific basis for the existence of biological differences between human races, beyond the trivial ones (black people tend to have darker skin, but that's a tautology). This has been known, and convincingly argued, since the first half of the 20th century. (In the 19th century, one might still have reasonably thought otherwise.)

Yet there have never stopped being believers in the race myth, regardless of the evidence. When they're regular folks, it's understandable: they're just ignorant victims of a school system and a culture that are behind the times. But even scientists -- who ought to know better -- keep falling for the myth! This shows the power that preconceptions and unconscious biases have to obscure the facts, and should humble all of us who have some association with science.

I have met people a couple of times with the naive idea that the Human Genome Project or some other advance in genetics will finally dismantle the idea of biological race. I've always found that a little baffling. Race isn't being refuted now; it has been refuted already! The original refutation came over half a century go, by anthropologists. We don't need genetics for that. The evidence is clear.

Just as it's a mistake to think that genetics will be the one to dispell misconceptions about race, it's naive to think that working in a more modern and technological science (like genetics) makes one wiser than those who work in older and less glitzy sciences (like anthropology).

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

But wouldn't natural selection dictate some inherent differences in race beyond simply skin color and hair texture? What I mean to say is that it is commonly believed that variances in skin color evolved over the years based on geography. It only seems logical that the selection of a favorable mate would vary based on some of the same geographic characteristics. What physical characteristics would be important for a person living in a mountainous region vs. an open plain? What about a dense forest vs. a grass land? Cold climate vs. warm? Wet vs. dry?

This would be peope choosing tall vs. stocky, fast vs. strong, physical prowess vs. resourcefullness based on their existing environmental conditions for thousands of years. Why wouldn't there be inherent physical differences (which could possibly include the preference of intellect vs. strength).

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

No gene pool is entirely isolated. Whenever groups of people interact for any period of time, they... interact. And most early human cultures were highly nomadic, going where the food was. So there were a lot of wandering genes, which did not always stay in one particular group.

Pacific Melanesians and Black Central Africans have similar phenotypes, but genetically are no more related than Vikings and Eskimos. Samoans were shaped by fighting for the right to marry, resulting in selection toward big, burly males, but there are still short Samoans. Unless you have a very small, closed gene pool, there will always be tremendous variation in types, and a whole "race" is far too large a population for that to apply to. Especially when it comes to selecting against intelligence, which is always a survival trait (At least, I can't think of any conditions where it isn't).

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I've been trying to assemble my thoughts on this topic and find DisinfoAgent has done a pretty darned good summing up. Bravo, DI.

A couple of further thoughts, sort of an appendix. Define 'race'. Most important. If we intend to discuss intelligence (or some subsets of it that are tested), and can make a deal out of small shifts in the mean of a population, we should make sure that the population represents an entity definable by some scientific criterion. Take 'black' (although I've never seen a black person, sort of a gamut from warm tan to a deep brown with purplish undertones. Or a white person, over the range from soft pink to deep brown). Dark skin seems, on average, to be a response to living in a climate with lots of high angle sunlight. So I assume it's something else. What is it?

Another comment earlier mentioned Jews as a race that seem to be brighter than the mean, since they win a large share of Nobel Prizes (not to mention play the violin well). Show me a Jewish genotype, please. Judaism is a religion and a culture, historically somewhat isolated (sic), but difficult to show as a race. (And I come back again to a need for an exact dedfinition of race).

So, while I'm pretty sure that all this intelligence testing is measuring something, it's far from obvious to me what it is being correlated to.

And none of it explains Mozart.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Or, ironically, Kary Mullis

Many have thought so, but they have invariably failed to prove it convincingly.

The origin of human skin color differences between geographic areas of the globe is still under discussion. One possibility is that it's an adaptation to sunlight, yes. Another I've heard about is sexual selection.

Maybe, but not all biological traits that matter for our survival have a straightforward relation to geography. Even when such a relation exists, it isn't always defined according to a north-south axis. For example, blood types seem to be distributed according to an east-west pattern.

Spock, you and your children and your children's children may all be shepherds living up in the mountains, but one day your great-great-grandson may prefer to be a blacksmith, and move to a village downhill to go learn the trade. Or "he" might be a she, and move to the village because that's where her husband's family lives, and the custom of your culture dictates that women move in with their husband when they marry. Or a band of nomadic invaders may destroy the village where they used to exchange their wool products for bread, forcing them to take their sheep and go make a living elsewhere...

Human beings have not stayed put in the same place throughout the last 4 million years. Although it may not seem so in some lifetimes, we're drifters. Human populations are dynamic: we intermarry, we invade, we migrate back and forth. We've just never let much moss grow on us.

As for intelligence, assuming there's such a well-defined and unique thing, I have little doubt that it's a useful aid to survival anywhere in this world.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I think that "our white race" is obsessed with race because of a complex of inferiority, because we all know how we whites brutally destroyed many native tribes of america, africa and australia, forced ours "smart" industrial nature destroying consumer way of life to another people, waged the worst wars in the history etc...
Do not forget Holocaust.
I cant help , but, that quote seems more like some neo-Nazi rethoric to me.