{"id":23,"date":"2007-10-25T10:33:46","date_gmt":"2007-10-25T15:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/?p=23"},"modified":"2007-10-25T10:33:46","modified_gmt":"2007-10-25T15:33:46","slug":"watson-out-as-unit-of-biological-mass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/2007\/10\/25\/watson-out-as-unit-of-biological-mass\/","title":{"rendered":"Watson Out as Unit of Biological Mass"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/10\/25\/science\/25cnd-watson.html?_r=1&amp;hp&amp;oref=slogin\" title=\"James Watson Retires After Racial Remarks\" target=\"_blank\">I guess &#8216;Watson&#8217; is out as a name<\/a> for the <a href=\"http:\/\/noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/?p=9\" title=\"Unit of Biological Mass Name Suggestions?\" target=\"_blank\">unit of biological mass<\/a> with James&#8217; comments that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/21362732\/\" title=\"The race remarks by Watson\" target=\"_blank\">people of African decent are intellectually <\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/ap.google.com\/article\/ALeqM5ha6Uxje06Fv054CU7LwK0-qiqNogD8SC14GO0\" title=\"The race remarks by Watson\">inferior to people of European decent<\/a>. It always amazes me exactly how idiotic smart people can be. Pride is the devil&#8217;s favorite sin and it is my suspicion that people like James Watson and the<a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/education\/higher\/articles\/2005\/01\/19\/harvard_womens_group_rips_summers\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Larry Summers thinks women inferior in math &amp; science\"> old president of Harvard Larry Summers<\/a> are guilty of it.  It seems that they believe since they got where they were first, as old white men, that other people are somehow inferior.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s worse is that if James Watson can make such a mistake, I shudder to think how many others make it and how many others will use these comments to propagate messages of hate.<\/p>\n<p>For the record this is one type of thing that I am trying to head off with my recent writings.  If you understand that <a href=\"http:\/\/noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=13\" title=\"Relativity in Evolutionary Biology\" target=\"_blank\">evolution is relative<\/a> then you won&#8217;t use biology as a reason to claim superiority.  You just can&#8217;t do it without contradicting relativistic principles.  (update: I think an ethics paper is in my future to flesh this out a tad)<\/p>\n<p>And these comments, if anything,  just go to show how stupid old white men can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I guess &#8216;Watson&#8217; is out as a name for the unit of biological mass with James&#8217; comments that people of African decent are intellectually inferior to people of European decent. It always amazes me exactly how idiotic smart people can be. Pride is the devil&#8217;s favorite sin and it is my suspicion that people like James Watson and the old president of Harvard Larry Summers are guilty of it. It seems that they believe since [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,23,32,34],"tags":[241,245,264,301,275,148],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-evolution","category-news","category-relativity","category-science","tag-biology","tag-evolution","tag-news","tag-race","tag-relativity","tag-watson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}