Equality and Science

You've probably heard about the comments by James Watson, but for those of you who haven't, let me briefly bring you up to speed. This guy won the Nobel prize back in 1962 for co-discovering the structure of DNA. He was supposed to give some sort of lecture today, but the lecture was canceled because he was quoted saying something to the effect that blacks are less intelligent than whites. The public was understandably outraged over the statement.

My wife and I were chatting last night and this subject came up. As soon as I filled her in, she went ballistic, complete with bulging veins and eyes, spittle flying from her frothing mouth, and steam flying from her ears. Oh wait, that was a cartoon. She didn't look like that, but she was angry. "That's not science," she exclaimed! She went on to say that Watson was quoting a junk science book that's been long disproven as culturally biased and yada, yada, yada.

Of course, this put me in devil's advocate mode, and I made this counter-point: In the early 1900's, science tended to indicate that whites were smarter than minorities and that men were smarter than women. Anything that indicated otherwise was ridiculed by the scientific community as junk science. Somewhere along the line, science started believing the opposite... human beings are equal in intelligence regardless of race or gender. Anything indicating otherwise is written off as culturally biased.

Now, with this said, as mankind grows and evolves, we are continually discovering that previous assumptions are wrong. Is it possible -- just possible -- that our current assumption of complete and total equality is a little bit off the mark? Is it imaginable that minor (but still statistically significant) differences (notice that I didn't say deficiencies) exist between races and genders?

Like I've said many times, I tend to believe -- hell, I want to believe -- that we're all roughly equal. At the same time though, I acknowledge the possibility that there are some sort of inherent differences among people. Just like it's possible that creationism and evolution are both wrong, (hey, maybe we are some alien race's giant experiment), it's possible that subtle yet measurable differences exist between different cultures.

By the way, going with the crazy assumption that such differences exist, I am not presumptious enough to believe that I'm automatically at the top of the genetic heap.

I wonder how much hate mail I'm going to get over this one.