Those are some odd comments by Dr. Watson.  He's promoting the idea that maybe in ten years, we'll find a gene that proves his hunch right?  Ok, fine.  In ten years, we'll examine it.  Why are we making news with an unsupported speculation?

Look, science has found some things about humans that are not particularly pretty.  Mostly, these findings are widely accepted by scientists, but they hardly ever make it out of science journals.  Take for instance the well established fact that evolutionarily speaking, humans are not designed to be truly monogamous.  Rather, we are best designed for a kind of serial monogamy interspersed with mild polygamy, though we are adaptable all the way to full blown polygamy.  Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any evolutionary evidence that we are built to marry for life.  Do these findings cause any kind of stir?  No.  Yet, they are pretty much as well established as any other primate mating behavior.

It's not scientists that are withholding findings because of PC concerns.  It's the religious, the conservatives, and the traditionalists who simply ignore or remain ignorant of what scientists have said.  This has always been so... long before the PC movement was ever invented.  

OK, let me start off with one of the dirty little secrets of IQ testing:

Yes, it is true that certain groups test out lower on average than other groups.

Now let's ask ourselves what this might actually mean. Does the cumulative IQ score of a community serve as a valid predictor of future success for any individual member of that community? Well, the answer really ought to be obvious. One simply cannot use the IQ scores of a person's neighbors as an indicator of how that person will proceed with their life.

Now with that out of the way, is there a statistical difference in IQ across racial lines? It could be viewed as uncomfortable but yes, that can be teased out of the data sets on IQ. However, there is a problem here. We have huge data sets on IQ testing and it is possible to track lots of different factors that might affect the scores of different groups of people. As it happens, many of the known factors that track poorly against IQ also track disproportionately across racial lines.

People who were malnourished as infants, people who were born addicted to crack, people who were born already infected with HIV. There are other factors as well but those few should be enough to make my point. We know that these factors are important variables in IQ testing and they play a much larger role that a person's race does.

However, because these factors do not cut evenly across racial lines, if you compile statistics to show how minorities do on tests insensitively to these and other factors, it really is not all that hard to get graphs that show how minorities seem to test out poorly as groups.

Let me restate one important fact: While it is trivial to get statistics to say lots of things, only by exercising a high level of caution can we be sure that what any given statistic is even viable. As relates to IQ, the IQ of one group vs another group does not say anything about individuals in those groups.

That's pretty much it.

Also, it's a bad idea for Near-Easterners and Blacks to take Primaquine if they get malaria.  Asians are not as good as Caucasians at digesting milk.  Ginger children should carry an umbrella in the sun.

There are lots of slight genetic variations in different human populations, but as we've discussed in detail before, "race" is kind of a nonsense term.