Few scientific fields are as fraught with risk as that of research into human intelligence. The two questions that arise over and over again are ‘is it a result of nature or nurture?’ and ‘to the extent it is nature, does race make a difference?’ Making stupid comments about the second question can be a career-killing move, as James Watson, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, recently found. He suggested that he was ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa’ because ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours [presumably he meant white people]-whereas all the testing says not really’. Such remarks are not merely offensive, they are scientifically weird. If the term race has any useful scientific meaning, then Africa, the continent where modern humanity began, is the most racially diverse place on the planet. The resulting hoo-ha caused Dr Watson to be eased out of the chancellorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, near New York, where he had worked for almost 40 years. Fortunately, the study of links between intelligence and genetics has some wiser practitioners than Dr Watson. One of them, Terrie Moffitt, of King’s […]