SCIENCE IS NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT

From an article about James Watson -- co-discoverer of the DNA double helix:

At a lecture at Berkeley in 2000, he argued that plump black people were predisposed to greater sexual arousal than say, skinny, white people, because of hormones associated with skin colour and weight gain. To illustrate this point, he flashed up a picture of Kate Moss looking typically miserable. Watson was interrupted from the front row by the chairman of the university's biology department, who informed him that 'This is not politically correct.' Watson replied, 'Ha!'

Watson is happy to say the unsayable, and indeed makes a point of it. 'People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty,' he suggests. 'I say it would be great.' Most controversially, he believes that if the possibility were to exist, eugenics should be used to 'cure' stupidity among the bottom 10 per cent in schools.

'Political correctness is very inhibiting to science,' he says. 'There is among human beings a great spread of abilities, and to deny these differences is also to deny that we can change them: a situation that does not help the people too much who don't have the ability. It's no good saying that everything is about education, you have to accept that some people are always going to find school hard. There are massive consequences of refusing to accept difference. It is hard to say, for example, what the long-term effect on England will be for having abolished grammar schools, but my guess is that it will change things for the worst.'