In what can only be described as an ironic twist of fate, James
Watson, the once-revered father of genetics who, along with
his partners Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, had worked out
the structure of DNA (deoxy-ribonucleic acid), decades ago,
has been made to eat his words, and has been humbled and humiliated
on the world stage.
Readers will recall the off the cuff and off colour remarks
made earlier this year by Watson, when he sought to use his
elevated status as the Father of Genetics, to push an utterly
hollow, false and intellectually-dishonest racist agenda.
He came out and declared that after years of his work, he has
concluded that persons of African origin are less intelligent
than persons of Caucasian origin.
History will now record that the only proof positive that Watson
himself can provide for this is the fact that after he was criticised,
embarrassed and humiliated on the world stage for such asinine
remarks, and was also asked to step down from several boards
and university committees, it has been established that he himself
is of 16 per cent African origin, and that he has 16 times more
genes of African origin than the average person of Caucasian
stock.
Ouch! That must hurt. It just goes to show and expose the paucity
and shallowness of the arguments of those, both abroad and here
at home in T&T, who relentlessly and persistently push their
racist, bigoted agendas.
We have had in T&T in the past persons who would sit and
count how many Indo-Trinidadians were working at an institution
and then count how many Afro-Trinidadians were working there
also, and then use those numbers, without more, to draw fallacious,
shallow and baseless conclusions that Indians were being discriminated
against, if their numbers happened to be less.
There would be no investigation as to how many had applied for
jobs there, or what were the qualification levels or criteria
or the selection methods, just a blanket inane, and puerile
conclusion that they were being discriminated against.
It takes a whole lot more intelligent analysis and probing in
order to be able to make any accurate assessments of such situations,
and it just shows that once you have your own pre-conceived
notions biases and agendas, you can then foolishly and unintelligently,
skew and twist any raw data to come up with your own perverted
conclusions.
Take, for example, Mr Panday’s favourite whipping horse
of racial discrimination. When all else fails, he invariably
resorts to this as his last refuge against logical, intelligent
thought processes and analysis, and just plays the race bogey
in an effort to obfuscate, rather than to elucidate, and to
generate more heat than light.
He has complained that the representations on state boards do
not reflect a racial balance in keeping with the ethnic diversity
of the country, and then this begs the question: do we then
say we are going out there looking for an Afro-Trinidadian to
fill this position or an Indo-Trinidadian to fill this post.
Or, do we instead just look for the best qualified T&T national
who can do the job, be he black, white, Chinese, Indian, pink,
purple or green?
You see, if we set out with the mindset that we must look for
an Indo-Trinidadian or an Afro-Trinidadian, we could end up
with artificial constructs, whereby intelligence and competence
and capability are sacrificed on the altar of the appearance
of racial balance.
We could end up with several more square pegs in round holes,
as if we do not have enough of those already.
Mr Panday’s supporters have responded to say that you must
then look for an intelligent and qualified Indo-Trinidadian
and put him in that post, and the simple answer to that is this:
If we believe that there is no genetic foundation based on race,
for determining intelligence, then intelligent people, average
people and stupid people will be fairly distributed in proportionate
amounts throughout all the races.
So the argument goes, that if you then simply choose the best-qualified
Trinidadians to fill the posts, then you should get a more than
equal spread throughout the mix, which would then be reflective
of the proportionate population percentages.
In fact, the merit-based method should actually find favour
with Messrs Panday and company, since Indo-Trinidadians have
grown in population numbers to represent the largest single
ethnic group.
So therefore, it would only be natural, over the course of time,
that on merit alone, their sheer weight of their numbers will
actually make Indo-Trinidadians the highest common factor in
state board representations, as other board members are rotated
or replaced with the effluxion of time.
The alternative to this is to walk the road that James Watson
has walked to his peril, whereby he has become impaled upon
his own sword, when in the relentless pursuit of disproving
his fallacious statements, a genetics company in Iceland actually
did a decoding of the genome map of the genes of James Watson
himself.
Watson, in the interests of science and filled with his stupid
pomposity, had allowed his genome to be published on the Internet
and when analysed, using methods he himself helped to pioneer,
it was shown that he himself has 16 times more genes of African
origin that the average Caucasian person.
Maybe in this regard, Mr Panday might want to also take that
leap of faith and publish his genome gene map on the Internet,
so that it may be analysed.
He will realise that we all are human beings here together on
this earth for a short while, and regardless of race, colour,
creed or class, you would find smart, people, average people
and stupid people everywhere in the world.
As Sir John Sulston, Nobel Laureate for human genome discoveries,
has said, “We do not understand enough about intelligence,
to even begin to generalise about race,” so maybe we could
all learn a lesson from the James Watson experience.
