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The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “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.".
He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who
have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because
“there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote
them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “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”.

He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence
could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission is studying Dr Watson’s
remarks “in full”.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said
today: “It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such
baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments.

“I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr
Watson’s personal prejudices. These comments serve as a reminder of the
attitudes which can still exist at the highest professional levels.”

Dr Watson was hailed as achieving one of the greatest single scientific
breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of
Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, forming part of the team which discovered
the structure of DNA.

He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis
Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.