Science apologizes. [View all]

[NNadir]

The editorial from Holden Thorpe (who I admire) editor of Science, on the 75th anniversary of the transistor.

Shockley was a racist and eugenicist

I believe it's open sourced, but some excerpts:

This week’s issue on the 75th anniversary of the transistor describes a triumph of both basic and applied science. What started out as studies on the fundamental physics of silicon led to the device that makes it possible to read this article online. The coinventor of the transistor, William Shockley, who along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, is correctly recognized as a primary architect of the computer age. Gordon Moore (cofounder of Intel Corporation) famously said that Shockley put the silicon in “Silicon Valley.” Appallingly, Shockley devoted the latter part of his life to promoting racist views, arguing that higher IQs among Blacks were correlated with higher extents of Caucasian ancestry, and advocating for voluntary sterilization of Black women. At the time, Science did not condemn Shockley for what he was: a charlatan who used his scientific credentials to advance racist ideology.

The failure of Science to condemn Shockley began in 1968, when it published a letter lamenting the fact that he was prohibited from speaking at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. The letter repeated the familiar trope that Shockley was simply asking questions about the role of race in intelligence. But Shockley had no scientific basis for doing so, he was not submitting peer-reviewed papers on the topic, and most importantly, he was using his ideas as the basis for promoting eugenics. Such a debate had no place in this journal...

...Following Shockley’s death in 1989, Nature correctly called out his racism in an obituary, but then published a letter from Seitz defending Shockley and claiming that the reason Shockley became a eugenicist was because of physical trauma he experienced in a near-fatal car accident. When Science wrote about this dustup, it referred to Shockley’s ideas as merely “unpopular” and “extremely controversial.” It then ran a letter from an even more notorious eugenicist, J. Philippe Rushton, who argued that by merely covering the disagreement at Nature, Science was delivering an “ad hominem attack.” In addition to an ill-advised decision to publish Rushton’s letter, Science posted a response saying, “no criticism of Shockley was intended.” Yikes...

Yikes! Indeed...

...Shockley was part of a cadre of physicists who advanced ideas outside of their area of expertise to promote a right-wing agenda. He was a close friend of Frederick Seitz—president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University—who, following a career in physics, became a purveyor of misinformation on tobacco, nuclear weapons, and climate change...

An apology that is overdue.

I'll be giving a lecture at the end of next month during which I will refer to the NCKX5 protein, which defines the main genetic difference between African people and people descended from Europeans. The latter, the Europeans, have a mutant form of this gene, a single nucleotide polymorphism that makes them increasingly susceptible to melanoma. It's only function is to form melanin is skin. It has nothing to do with neurological tissue.

Have a nice weekend.