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Happy New Year! For the first newsletter of 2019, I’ve asked my colleague Amy Harmon, a Pulitzer winner and National correspondent, to contribute.

Amy has written about the intersection of science and race at The New York Times for over a decade. Her piece on white supremacists chugging milk, from October, was one of my favorites of 2018.

Her most recent story is about the biologist James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, and his unfounded pronouncements on genetics, race and intelligence. Dr. Watson is the subject of a new PBS documentary, “American Masters: Decoding Watson.”

Amy writes about her piece on Dr. Watson, and the response to it, below.

By Amy Harmon

In 2007, when the Nobel-winning biologist James D. Watson’s view that blacks were less intelligent than whites was first reported, he was on a tour to promote his book, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.”

A line from the book explained the basis for his beliefs: “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically,” Dr. Watson wrote.

In other words, he was suggesting that evolution may not have acted upon cognitive traits in African populations the same way it did in populations that left Africa.

Confusion among nonscientists over recent advances that show the ways evolution has shaped population differences is one reason I’ve been compelled to return to this subject in my recent reporting.

The internet is teeming with people determined to use science as proof of racial hierarchy. There is no existing genetic evidence to support the view that blacks are less intelligent than whites. But the argument, which rests on data from IQ-type tests that show lower average scores among blacks, persists.

In a widely-read Times Op-Ed last spring, the prominent human geneticist David Reich, of Harvard, argued that geneticists have underplayed the degree to which human populations are likely to have genetic differences.

But it’s the different environments — things like family wealth, access to education, nutrition, and living in a racist society — inhabited by black and white Americans that has led most scientists to believe that IQ differences arise from nongenetic causes. And, since environments impact the way genes get expressed, and there’s no way to equalize the environment — except to fix racism — there’s no way to do a controlled experiment.

It has been interesting to observe how people have responded to my reporting on all of this. In response to my piece on Dr. Watson this week, some biologists argued that The Times, as well as PBS, should not be devoting space to him. But Nathan A. Smith, a black neuroscientist at Children’s National Health System, disagreed.

Dr. Smith contacted me after watching the PBS documentary. He had been struck by an archival clip of a Charlie Rose interview with Dr. Watson, in which Dr. Watson said that he had not intended for his comments about race to be made public.

“That statement made me think just how many other scientists feel this way and keep their thoughts close to the vest,” Dr. Smith wrote. “If we want to eradicate this type of misinformation, we must continue to shine a light on it.”

Additional reading:

Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed)

‘Could Somebody Please Debunk This?’: Writing About Science When Even the Scientists Are Nervous

Geneticists Criticize Use of Science by White Nationalists to Justify ‘Racial Purity’

For more coverage, see our archive and sign up here to have Race/Related delivered weekly to your inbox.

Lauretta Charlton is an editor on the National Desk and the editor of the Race/Related newsletter. She was previously a news editor at The New Yorker and a music columnist at New York magazine. @laurettaland

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