Felix Salmon points to the declining price of self-knowledge.
- Cost of sequencing Craig Venter’s genome: $3 billion, over 10 years.
- Cost of sequencing James Watson’s genome: $1 million, over 2 months.
- Cost of sequencing an anonymous African’s genome: $100,000, over 1 month.
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Matt,
You misspelled “Steve Sailer” and “cheap,” not to mention writing “this show either.”
The last pages of James Watson’s autobiography from last summer, Avoid Boring People, are devoted to the implications of the declining cost of genome sequencing, especially how are our reigning ideologies won’t be able to handle what we will find out.
“To my regret, [Larry] Summers, instead of standing firm, within a week apologized publicly three times for being candid about what might well be a fact of evolution that academia will have to live with. Except for the psychologist Steve Pinker, no prominent Harvard scientist voiced a word in Summers’s defense; I suspect the majority were fearful of being tarred with the brush of political incorrectness.”
The end of Avoid Boring People centers upon an April 2006 meeting between Watson and the post-Larry Summers interim president of Harvard, Derek Bok, who had also been president when Watson was a professor there in the 1970s.
Watson writes:
“Before leaving Derek’s temporary office I remarked that the time was surely not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians. Since 1978, when a pail of water had been dumped over [Harvard sociobiologist] E.O. Wilson for saying that genes influence the behavior of humans as well as of other animals, the assault against behavioral science by wishful thinking has remained vigorous.” …
“The relative extents to which genetic factors determine human intellectual abilities will also soon become much better known. … A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”
Watson ends his autobiography with a brief but telling exchange with then-acting Harvard president Bok:
“So I was not surprised when Derek asked apprehensively how many years would pass before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of ‘fifteen years’ meant Summers’s then-undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato.
Upon returning to the Yard, however, I was not sure that even ten years would pass.”
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