Matthew Cobb

So it was actually quite reassuring that he's not a complete genius in everything.

There are parts of the world, in particular the social world, that he just doesn't understand and doesn't make the effort to try and work out what's going on.

So there were times, most of the time, I was just kind of astonished by quite how clever he was.

But there are these other parts where I can see, no, you don't get it.

You don't understand.

So why don't you understand it?

And the book that I ended up putting him on was that these ideas come from his Edwardian past.

He was born in 1916, right?

So that's a long time ago.

Yeah.

And he imbibed all these ideas in the 1920s, which were as kind of nationalistic and stupid and, you know, racist as you might expect, and never really interrogated them.

And for most of his life, it had no consequence because he wasn't thinking about such things.

But when he did, he kind of flipped back to this very old way of thinking.

Yeah, well, Jim's actually a bit more interesting because one of the things I noticed was in 1972, there was a petition to the academies, the National Academies of Science in the USA, to say that there should be support for research into the genetic basis of intelligence.

Now, we know what they mean, right?

We know nothing about black people or anything like that was mentioned, but we know what they meant.

And it was all to do in particular with the work of Arthur Jensen.

And Crick signed this petition and he got people like Jacques Monod to sign it.

Jim Watson did not sign it.

And it was all coached in terms of academic freedom.