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Scientific breakthroughs are rarely unique; someone else would’ve made them soon enough. But when prominent scientists cause harm, that harm isn’t inevitable; the world might simply have been better had the harm not been inflicted.

One more comment on Jim Watson. When I was writing Francis Crick's biography, Jim was consistently generous with time and material, even Crick's furious personal attacks on Jim during the row over the writing of the Double Helix. He really did value the truth above all else.

In the good old days, heretics like DNA structure co-discoverer James D. Watson were burned at the stake or at least confined to house arrest. What has happened to our morals that Watson merely lost his job for his comments? @eric_lander

Dear @amy_harmon, I hear that the awful James D. Watson believes Shakespeare's plays were written by Shakespeare instead of by a Jewish woman named Emilia Bassano. Can't the New York Times do even more to humiliate Watson? For example, why is Watson even allowed to live indoors?

Stunning revelation in January 16, 2019 New York Times: James D. Watson has never seen "Black Panther" and hasn't even _heard_ of Wakanda, so it's no surprise at all that Watson is ignorant about genetics.

I'm surprised this live-action re-enactment of a Bill Cosby Fat Albert cartoon hasn't gone viral:

New on SteveSailer dot Net : The Wit and Wisdom of James D. Watson Quotes from the co-discoverer of DNA. stevesailer.net/p/the-wit-an…

New on SteveSailer dot Net -- NYT: Sierra Club Is Collapsing Due to DEI Who knew that George Floyd wasn't relevant to wilderness preservation? stevesailer.net/p/nyt-sierra…

New on SteveSailer point Net -- The George Steinbrenner of Genetics The seemingly irascible James D. Watson had a remarkable record as a manager. Link in replies. (Do I still have to do this?)

In 2020, on the eve of the Covid outbreak in the US, I gave a lecture at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, on genomic prediction and machine learning applied to genomics. Watson was unable to attend the talk, although he badly wanted to, because by then he was persona non grata at the institute that he himself had built into one of the great laboratories of molecular biology. He invited me to his house, adjacent to the grounds of the institute. I was afraid that I might transmit the virus to Watson (I had had a fever just the previous day) and that it could kill him. Luckily this did not transpire. We had a long conversation, which for me was deeply moving. He had followed my work for years, he said, and regarded our capability to finally predict human complex traits from DNA to be the culmination of his scientific dream. He presented me with a copy of his book, Father to Son: Truth, Reason, and Decency, a memoir of his family in America. Watson and I share Midwestern roots - his extending back many generations. He lamented what had happened to America during his lifetime, and shared other frank views. It did not escape my notice that we shared the same values - Truth, Reason, and Decency. infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/0…

One morning around four or five years ago, I got a phone call from James Watson. I was startled. I had met him only once, at a conference at Cold Spring Harbor in the mid-1990s and we hadn't been in touch since. I can remember few details, but I do remember that the call lasted for at least twenty minutes and that I soon realized that my job was to listen. James Watson needed a sympathetic ear. Perhaps he saw me as someone who had experienced on a far smaller scale something similar to what he had experienced. Perhaps he figured (correctly) that I would agree with what pained him the most: He hadn't done anything wrong. He had spoken candidly about his assessment of the evidence regarding the B/W difference in IQ. His conclusion that genetics were part of the story was shared by the majority of specialists in IQ. And yet his professional career and reputation had been devastated. He wanted to live long enough for his remarks to be vindicated. I do remember reminding him of some good news. Since the genome had been sequenced, it had been established that evolutionary change had taken place after the dispersal from Africa and that the change had been mostly local, not shared across continents. The genetic evidence from GWAS studies had already found ubiquitous population differences across all the races, including variants associated with cognition. Vindication would come. But I got no sense that I had done anything to ease his anguish. Now he is dead. In a half century, his reputation as one of history's great biologists will have been restored. People will know that he had the misfortune to reach old age in an era when the academy was lunatic. I hope he realized that before the end.

The left sure acts as if they are terrified of the intelligent public becoming less ignorant about intelligence: witness the then-stunning cancellations of heavyweight insiders like Harvard president Larry Summers and DNA structure co-discoverer James D. Watson.

Larry Summers, one of the most Connected insiders in US, lost his job as president of Harvard in sizable part for giving a reasonable scientific explanation for why more Harvard math professors are men than women. James D. Watson was our most distinguished senior Man of Science.

The two shocking to me (at the time) harbingers of cancel culture were in 2005-07: Harvard President Larry Summers for repeating Pinknerian talking points about why there were more male than female Harvard math professors, and James D. Watson on W-B test score gaps.

Wheeling Park’s (WV) Akeem Davis with the THICK SIX 😤🔥 (via @WPFOOTBALLTWBAI) More: maxpreps.com/wv/wheeling/whe…

@Steve_Sailer telegraph.co.uk/gift/ce2b721…

Like, the Predator comes home after eviscerating a bunch of Delta Force dudes...only to get treated like that dentist who shot Cecil the lion.

Say we make friends with the Predators on their home planet and they turn out to be cool, tolerant, and blue-haired. They think the hunter Predators are reactionary racists. But pretty soon the woke Predators are running everything on Earth in a really annoying, nagging way.