Table of Contents
- The Near Universal Racialism of a Century Ago
- Carl Degler and In Search of Human Nature
- Carleton Putnam and Race and Reason
- William H. Tucker and The Funding of Scientific Racism
- Nathaniel Weyl and The Negro in American Civilization
- Carleton Coon and The Origin of Races
- Pat Shipman and The Evolution of Racism
- John R. Baker and Race
- Hans Eysenck and Race, Intelligence and Education
- Richard Lynn, Tatu Vanhanen, and IQ and the Wealth of Nations
- J. Philippe Rushton and Race, Evolution, and Behavior
- Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, and The 10,000 Year Explosion
- Richard D. Fuerle and Erectus Walks Amongst Us
- Unknown Books That Would Restore the Reality of Race
The Near Universal Racialism of a Century Ago
Few if any scientists in modern world history have enjoyed as long and celebrated a career as James Watson, who died earlier this month at the age of 97.Our leading media outlets gave his passing the coverage that it warranted, with his obituary in the New York Times running well over 4,000 words and the Wall Street Journal also being lavish in its treatment.
As all these media stories explained, Watson had rocketed to worldwide fame more than seventy years ago at the age of 25 when together with Francis Crick, he had discovered DNA in 1953, then shared a Nobel Prize for that achievement a decade later. DNA constitutes the mechanism of heredity for nearly all earthly lifeforms, so his scientific triumph was one of the most important biological advances in all of human history.
During the remaining seven decades of his extremely long professional career, he enjoyed other achievements that might easily have represented the crowning success for almost any other scientist.
In 1968 Watson told the story of his DNA research work in The Double Helix, a huge international bestseller that became one of the most popular scientific books ever published. That same year he was appointed director of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory in New York State, a small research facility that had fallen on hard times, and he soon lifted it into the front ranks of American scientific establishments. In the early 1990s, he played a central role in launching and leading the Human Genome Project, an undertaking that eventually mapped the entire genetic structure of the human species, a colossal scientific breakthrough.
Indeed, throughout most of the last half-century or more, Watson was often regarded as the world’s most important living scientist.
Yet as his obituaries and other media coverage emphasized, his very long and towering scientific reputation was severely blighted in 2007 when he was engulfed in a terrible public scandal. At the age of 79, he had published his autobiography Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science and when interviewed by a journalist on his international book tour, he casually suggested the possibility that black Africans might be less intelligent than other groups. That racialist remark immediately ignited a gigantic media firestorm, leading to waves of vilification. A dozen years later, a television documentary was broadcast that included clips of the 90-year-old scientist repeating some of those same ideas regarding race and genetics, thereby reigniting and greatly amplifying that same bitter controversy.
As a result of those brief and speculative remarks, the man hitherto often ranked as the world’s greatest living scientist was massively demonized and stripped of many of his accumulated honors and positions, even including his honorary emeritus status at the scientific laboratory whose national reputation he himself had almost singlehandedly created. Watson was widely presented as a vile, even depraved individual, and although he was not physically burned at the stake, in many other respects his fate resembled what would have befallen anyone expressing sympathy for Lucifer in the Old Salem of our 17th century Massachusetts Bay colony.
In a sign of his desperation, at one point Watson publicly auctioned off his Nobel Prize medal, whether seeking to raise money or merely attract sympathetic attention, with a Russian oligarch buying it for $4.5 million and then returning it to the great scientist.
I suspect that the reason that so elderly and distinguished a public figure was subjected to such extreme waves of media vilification was mostly as a warning to others. If the reputation of the world’s greatest biological scientist, the discoverer of the basis of human heredity, could be totally destroyed for his casual racialist speculations, every other scientist and non-scientist in the world was put on notice that they must avoid considering any such similar ideas........
......
Unknown Books That Would Restore the Reality of Race
According to a slightly reworked quote widely attributed to the famed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, “Reality is what remains when you stop believing in it.”
For nearly the last one hundred years, the overwhelming majority of our intellectual and political elites have refused to accept this crucial principle. Instead, they have seemed to believe that the reality of important racial matters must conform to their ideological framework rather than the other way round. Exactly this same sort of stubbornly dogmatic refusal to accept reality eventually led to the decay and collapse of the Soviet Union some three generations after it was founded.
Back in 2017 I was interviewed for an hour or two over the phone by a New York Times journalist focused on the racially related political topics that had suddenly begun dominating the national headlines. She seemed very skeptical that race was a scientifically valid concept, and quite surprised when I told her that saying “race does not exist” was roughly equivalent to asserting that “gravity does not exist.”
I pointed out that her longtime colleague Nicholas Wade, an award-winning science journalist, had published an entire book a couple of years earlier on the science of race. Furthermore, just a few weeks before our conversation her own newspaper had devoted the entire front section of its prestigious Week in Review to a lengthy exposition of the undeniable scientific reality of race by David Reich, a prominent professor of Genetics at Harvard University and the Broad Institute.
But despite these points, she still seemed quite unconvinced, presumably reflecting the uniformly contrary opinions of her own journalistic peer-group. Then three years later during the Black Lives Matter upheavals of 2020, James Bennet, the highly regarded Opinion Editor of the Times, was suddenly purged for insufficient “wokeness.” So I suspect that henceforth her beliefs will no longer be disturbed by any such discordant scientific information appearing in her own newspaper.
The dozen almost unknown books that I have featured above differ in many respects. Some were written by journalists or researchers deeply committed to the cause of anti-racism. Others were by renowned scholars at some of our most prestigious academic institutions who sought to dispassionately present the scientific facts as they were best understood. And a few were by committed laymen, seeking to inform the world about issues and ideas that they regarded as important.
Some of these works were released by leading publishers and attracted a great deal of initial attention, while others were essentially self-published and greeted with near absolute silence. But today all these important works are almost equally unknown.
Three years ago I self-published Race and Ethnicity in America, my own hefty collection of essays on those topics. Although I thought that many of my pieces were quite good, few involved the sort of original research that was found in all those other twelve books. My current Amazon sales ranking is quite low, around 500,000, which hardly surprises me.
But although the current sales rank for my own book is low, nearly all those other books have lower ones, generally far, far lower. There seem to be few if any current sales of those important volumes written by leading scholars and journalists on an absolutely crucial topic, and in some cases no copies are even available.
For a country whose reigning ideology seems obsessed with race, it is a great tragedy that so many of the important books able to properly reveal and clarify those underlying issues today remain almost totally unknown.
Related Reading:
- Bibliography
- White Racialism in America, Then and Now
- American Pravda: Six Unknown Books Against a Century of Falsehoods
- American Pravda: A Dozen Unknown Books and the World War II History They Reveal
- American Pravda: Six Unknown Books and Their Dangerous Jewish Secrets
- Race, IQ, and Wealth
- How Social Darwinism Made Modern China
