Why Elon Musk shouldn’t be kicked out of the Royal Society

In a notorious interview in the Sunday Times in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson said, among other things, that aborting babies with gay genes was ‘common sense’ and that ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their [blacks] intelligence is the same as ours [whites] – whereas all the testing says not really’. He also defended the explanation offered by Larry Summers of why there are fewer female professors in Stem subjects than male – there are more men at the right-hand tail of the IQ distribution curve. It caused such a furore that Watson was forced to cancel a forthcoming book tour, Nature ran an editorial saying his remarks were ‘beyond the pale’ and the trustees of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended him from administrative duties, forcing him to retire shortly afterwards.