It seems like retribution is in order: Richard Roberts wants a leave of absence, as his wife claims to live in “a morally upright manner” even while rumors of associations with a 16-year-old boy swirl about.
James Watson’s sold-out lecture in London has been cancelled. I guess making bogus accusations about the congenital stupidity of a whole continent has consequence.
Greg knows a bit about the anthropology of race, and he also knows how to make fools suffer. Now he has weighed in on Watson.
I’m pretty sure he left boot marks on the old man.
Greg has followed through now with more criticisms of ‘scientific’ racism.
James Watson has really put his foot in it this time. He has a tendency to say some shockingly offensive and bizarre things.
Michael Egnor is the gift that keeps on giving. He’s been responding to criticisms from us sciencebloggers with more and more inanities — it’s like all you have to do is poke him and he starts puking up more and more transparently fallacious creationist talking points.
Mark Chu-Carroll schools him on his tired claim that selection is a tautology, something we’ve been hearing from creationists since at least the days of Gish. In response to Orac’s challenge, requesting examples of how ‘design’ has helped modern medicine, Egnor coughed up … Watson’s and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA? You’ve got to be kidding me. Orac sounds incredulous, too.
I had dinner with James Watson last January, and one of the topics of conversation was, of course, Intelligent Design creationism (it comes up a lot around me, for some reason). I can tell you with absolute certainty that Watson has nothing but contempt for those fellows; so much so that he considers arguing with them beneath him (which is true enough.) If you want to read his opinion of evolution, one place to look is in a book he edited, called Darwin: the Indelible Stamp(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s a collection of four of Darwin’s books, with a foreword and introduction to each written by Watson. The work he and Crick did strengthened evolutionary theory, it was not independent of it, and to try and recruit the man’s work to the side of Egnor’s creationism is simply ridiculous.
Let’s see…what did I do today? I met with a whole bunch of people at Seed. They were cool, but they won’t notice that I mentioned them because they never read my blog.
I also had dinner with Niles Eldredge, James Watson, Adam Bly, and Laura McNeil (big guns at Seed).
It was an engrossing evening, but now you’re all going to really hate me: I can drop names, but I’m not going to reveal private conversations…other than to mention that I was honored by a toast from that distinguished crowd, which means I can either die smug, or I’ve got a heck of a lot to do to live up to it now. I fear the latter, unfortunately.
Books from Nobel laureates in molecular biology have a tradition of being surprising. James Watson(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was catty, gossipy, and amusingly egotistical; Francis Crick(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) went haring off in all kinds of interesting directions, like a true polymath; and Kary Mullis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was just plain nuts. When I heard that Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was coming out with a book, my interest and curiousity were definitely piqued. The work by Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus has shaped my entire discipline, so I was eagerly anticipating what her new book, Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) would have to say.
It wasn’t what I expected at all, but I think readers here will be appreciative: it’s a primer in developmental biology, written for the layperson! Especially given a few of the responses to my last article, where the jargon seems to have lost some people, this is going to be an invaluable resource.
