/lit/ - Literature

It's hard to reconcile how otherwise towering geniuses such as Francis Galton and Ronald Fischer who were right about everything else still held racist beliefs about the innate differences between races.

This treads into highly politically incorrect territory , but it's reasonable to wonder why these figures are highly regarded in all their other accomplishments and their work is thought to maintain a high degree of truth, yet this one point of deviation sets them apart and smudges their otherwise spotless records.One also has to wonder why James Watson, perhaps the world's foremost geneticist, claimed that there was a link between heritable intelligence and race. Is it really because he's just a crotchety old racist white man? Men as accomplished and intelligent as him have no interest being racist in the vehement aggravated sense.

Let me make it clear I do not support discrimination, and the definition of intelligence is not even well founded in the first place and may carry some cultural bias in how it has been conventionally formulated. But wouldn't it be better if we were approaching these issues with an open mind, evaluating all hypotheses, and therefore deal with reality rather than some idealized moral projection of it ?

Whatever the reality is, it is what it is, not what we want it to be, and so the facts as they are in themselves will always work to spite a false ideology that tries to speak over them.