Menopause and Melanin

A Scientific Exposition/Rebuttal by Dr. James Dewey Watson,
Nobel Prize Winner 1962, Physiology or Medicine

(A Satire)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Esteemed Colleagues, Students of Genetics and Medicine:

As many of you already know, I received the Nobel Prize for my co-discovery of the structure of DNA. I’ve been the chancellor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States, where I created a research environment unparalleled in the world of science. There, we prided ourselves for our non-profit research dedicated to exploring biology and genetics, advancing our ability to diagnose and treat cancers, neurological diseases and other causes of human suffering.

But that’s not good enough for some people, is it? Some people have to get their knickers in a twist over the following statements I made recently:

1) I am “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says ‘not really.’”

2) “Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so,” because “”people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

In simpler words, what I’m saying is this: people whose ancestors come from Africa are just not as smart as people whose ancestors don’t come from Africa. We have indisputable proof of this, because of their test scores, which are consistently lower than everyone else’s.

Boy, you’d think I’d said something terrible, the way some people are carrying on. I even had to resign my post today as chancellor at CSHL, a centre I helped put on the map, simply by my being on staff there. Those ungrateful weasels.

What’s really got my goat however, are the comments made by two female bloggers. One, a young lawyer, being honored at Brown University, comes across as intelligent, passionate about social change and dedicated in her quest to lead a purposeful life, but in actuality is a sassy whippersnapper who needs her cute little ‘tushie’ spanked. And I’m just the man to do it.

She called me a “senile old fogey.” And who does she think she is? Does she have a Nobel Prize? (Not yet.)

I do. And would they give a Nobel Prize to someone who doesn’t deserve it? Certainly not.

However, even more irritating than the young lawyers remarks, were those made by a former New York City Public school teacher, Patricia Volonakis Davis, the self-proclaimed “Ph.d in Patrichism,” who stated, “Just ignore him.”

How dare she?

I took care of her, though. I took over her article space today. The second thing I did was ring her up and ask her what-in-the-Sam-Hill did she think she was doing telling people to “ignore” me?

‘Dr.’Davis, in what I can only describe as a diatribe, then said that when she was teaching at an inner city school in New York City, she’d observed the following about standardized tests:

1) The black children who tested poorly on exams were often children who hadn’t eaten breakfast, or had had one consisting of sugary cakes and coffee. This was because their parents had to go out early to work, or worked nights at minimum wage jobs and left the children unsupervised, to get ready for school on their own. Others were simply too poor to eat before they came to school. Some did not have reasonable bedtimes. Lack of sleep, empty stomachs and/or high levels of sugar and caffeine in the bloodstream prevalent in lower-income, unsupervised middle-graders, does not make for controlled test conditions.

2) Black children who had dyslexia also scored low on exams, because their learning differences were purposely misdiagnosed by the school examiners. That was because in New York State at the time, students with certain learning differences, such as dyslexia, could be assisted only by specially-trained ‘outside’ teachers. In order to prevent spending school funds on ‘outside’ teachers and in order for special-ed teachers to maintain the number of pupils required to support the need for their special-ed classes, children who had dyslexia were deliberately placed in with teachers who were not trained to help them improve their scores. ADHD was also not taken into consideration and often left undiagnosed by teachers, as well as by uneducated parents.

3) Testing conditions were chaotic. Tenured teachers showed up late to proctor exams because they knew they couldn’t lose their positions over it and because they believed wholeheartedly that the pupils were bound to do poorly, regardless of test conditions. One example was of a proctor who showed up over ten minutes late to a class that had been painstaking tutored for the test by their classroom teacher. Though they achieved high scores whilst in her classroom environment, the unsupervised pupils grew bored waiting for the proctor and decided that a brilliant way to pass the time would be to pull off all the chewed gum stuck under the desks, roll it into one big ball and hit the blackboard with it. The giant ball of old chewing gum bounced back and one student (black) was hit with it. He had a swollen eye as a result, but was told to take the test anyway. The test started almost twenty minutes late in that particular class (tests are timed and all classes must finish together, by law) and the pupil with the swollen eye who’d scored an 80% in classroom practice tests, got a 49% on the actual exam. The rest of the class lost twenty minutes of time to answer their questions and scored lower than on their practice tests, as well.

4) Extra federal funds (called Chapter 11 funds) were issued proportionately to the schools, based on the number of pupils below the 50 percentile in reading, writing and math. The more pupils per school at these low levels (based on their test scores) the more funds the school was given. There was no way the federal government could ever determine what the funds were actually being spent on, or how the tests had been administered at every public school.

Dr. Davis had a lot more to say than this, including some stuff about parental “modeling,” average parental age and education, as well as the fear some black students admitted to having that if they did well on tests, they’d be mocked by their peers for trying to be “white,” but I say it’s all “poppycock.”

For starters, if you look at a photo of Patricia Davis, you can see that, she:

(a) has crows’ feet, therefore it’s logical to conclude she is
(b) not a young woman.
If a, then b.
She (c) is also not smiling very much very often.

If we have the above ( a \ b + c) it’s logical to conclude that she is d) peri-menopausal:

(a \ b + c) = d

And we all know that peri-menopausal women are unfeminine, infertile, bloated, illogical, and unless we feed them volumes of chocolate and apple martinis, downright nasty.

Consequently, Dr. Davis’ conclusions come from nothing more than her being an old, dried-up, smarty-pants b*tch.

On the other hand, my conclusions that those of African ancestry are not as smart as everyone else, are based on true scientific methodology. Obviously we couldn’t administer standardized tests to every black on the African continent, because they’re all very busy killing each other in civil wars, recruiting children to become mercenaries, stealing diamonds back and forth and selling them to Americans, Dutch and English merchants and getting AIDS, that they don’t have the time to sit down and learn how to read and write. Especially in English.

However, we did have a control group and in that group, my team of biologists and genetic researchers were able to conclude that the more melanin someone is born with, as evidenced by the presence of darker or lighter “coffee-color” of the dermal tissue (skin) the less intelligent they are. The pigment directly affects the brain function.

The following chart will demonstrate that undeniably. I’ve included photos of several African-Americans who have “light- to deep coffee skin tone,” STRICTLY for reference in correlating the test scores to the skin color:

Skin Tones and Correlating Test Scores in Reading, Writing and Intelligence:

Dr. Ronald E. McNair –DARKEST COFFEE

Darkest Coffee- 59% below average. Many of those in this color group could not spell the words, “astronaut” or “Challenger hero.”

Dr. Martin Luther King –DARK COFFEE

Dark Coffee – 49% below average. Those in this group had trouble writing out the “I Have a Dream,” speech.

Dr. Yvonne Cagel –MEDIUM COFFEE

Medium-Coffee – 40 % below average. Could identify and write the “I Have a Dream Speech” but had trouble with the definition of “empowered female.”

Ms. Halle Berry –LIGHT COFFEE

Light Coffee- 20% below average. Knew all of the above, but had some trouble remembering the name of the character, Cliff Huxtable, played by Bill Cosby on The Bill Cosby Show.

As you can see, the lighter the skin, the HIGHER the test score.

From these results we can conclude quite plausibly that those with no skin pigment whatsoever, would be the SMARTEST people on earth.

And therefore, as I go out on my own, after my fifty years at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, I would like to introduce to you my new partner in genetic research, Edgar Winter:

Edgar Winter –The Most Intelligent Human Being

Edgar, who has albinism, did not go into the sciences as a young man. He was in the arts, a “blues and metal musician.” But it was evident even in this field, that he was brilliant and well-read, because the title of his hit album, They Only Come Out at Night, is in perfect verb agreement and his most popular tune, Frankenstein, was named for Mary Shelley’s classic work of literature.

Further, those with the most intelligence will see, quite clearly, really, that my original hypotheses and eventual conclusions were brought about by well-conducted and sound research.

Skeptics be damned.

_____________________________

James D. Watson ( Upon my retirement, October 25, 2007)