That PBS documentary on James Watson wasn’t half bad, if you are able to abide a deep dive into the life of a man with almost Trumpian levels of self-delusion (but unlike Trump, with an actual germ of intelligence). The theme of the show, I would say, is that Watson is a man who says what he thinks, so they just let him speak.

So what does James Watson think?

He’s a scientific genius. Rosalind Franklin was an incompetent. DNA is a more important idea in biology than evolution. He’s smarter than Darwin. You are determined by your genes. No one has ever shown any evidence that environment plays a more significant role than genetics. Black people are less intelligent than white people. He regrets having to say that, but you have to speak the truth. He has black friends. He liked to surround himself with pretty girls in the lab. The stuff he said about how everyone knows black employees are inferior was said in a private conversation, and how dare that reporter publish it. His loyal wife argues that he’s not really a racist, because racists say mean things with the intent to make others miserable. Watson’s ego is immense.

I also learned a few things I didn’t know before.

His wife was an 18 year old undergraduate 20 years his junior, working in his office, when he started courting her (this would be considered a serious ethical problem now, but as we are reminded several times, the old boy network was strong.) I’ve met his wife, she was very nice, but seemed a bit frazzled by her efforts to moderate Watson’s comments when they veered off into apologetics for eugenics, as they seemed to do. He has a son with serious mental health issues and a history of behavioral problems…and Watson cared for and loved him very much, which was the one redeeming feature I took away from the show. He also has a lot of former students and colleagues who practically idolize him, but even they think he’s wrong in his genetics mania.

The way it portrayed Maurice Wilkins made him out to be a petty, spiteful little shit. How did Watson and Crick get Franklin’s crucial data? Because Wilkins was resentful of this woman working in his division, and just handed it over. Her data, not his. I guess you can get a Nobel prize for backstabbing.

There were some omissions. The program didn’t say much about his sexism — it shied away from giving any details of the objectionable lectures he was giving that led to his downfall. I would have used more quotes from The Double Helix. Those were his own words, he’s clearly proud of the book, but the way he demeaned Rosalind Franklin was blatant and deplorable. There’s a bit of that, but I would guess they were minimized because the details would have made the show too much of a hatchet job.

‘Watson Decoded’ was good journalism, just presenting the facts and letting Watson hang himself with his own words, but I worry about how some people will twist the facts. Here’s a SUPER-GENIUS who thinks BLACK GENES ARE INFERIOR, and rather than recognizing that he’s a flawed person with deep biases, as the program demonstrates, they’ll see it as a validation of racist ideas. But then, you can’t do much about people with willful, hateful prejudices, and they could have just put up a big black screen with blinking letters saying “HE’S WRONG” (as Nancy Hopkins plainly says), and those people would just ignore it anyway.

I am now committed. This morning, I got to work and started dismantling my jerry-built zebrafish facility. It was built to last, with annoying bolts everywhere, some of them quite high up on the structure, and now I can’t feel my right shoulder after all the wrench work above my head. We got the bulk of it disassembled and removed, and all that’s left right now is a lot of PVC plumbing suspended from the ceiling and going nowhere, with a huge cattle trough (the water reservoir) and a big ol’ water pump. That’ll go tomorrow, clearing up a whole bunch of bench space, which I think will be home to a new, additional incubator.

Now I need to figure out what to do with the stuff. Mary might use some of it to set up a herb garden in our sun room — it’s a lot of shelving and shallow trays. There is also a great deal of hydroponic gear I used to deliver recycled water to the tanks, and she got a glint in her eye and dreamt of a hydroponic drip system for plants…which may be overly ambitious.

But there’s no going back now. I’m going to be running an arthropod lab, rather than a fish lab, which is a bit of a change. I’m still young enough to change my research focus, right? Although not young enough to do serious physical labor without feeling like I overtaxed every muscle in my upper body.

The current spider egg case I was hoping to see hatch out with a new generation of spiders isn’t looking so good. I opened it up to find way too many dead eggs, and then made a time lapse to see babies just fading away. It’s sad and miserable. I’m putting it here to document my dismal Christmas eve.

I’m gonna have to cancel Christmas. There is no reason for anyone to celebrate.

He’s not going to be able to wiggle out of this one, although I’m sure he’ll try: Jordan Peterson is a climate change denialist. That link has all the evidence, direct quotes, tweets, etc. He praises some loon who thinks CO₂ is steadily declining, leading to the extinction of all life on Earth in 2 million years, and that we ought to praise the heroic oil companies for releasing sequestered carbon and saving the planet. One of his sources is Richard Lindzen, prattling away in a Prager U video. He’s a fool on this subject, and many others.

But why would a well-educated college professor plunge so deeply into ignorance? The article has a good explanation.

But as his former mentor at UofT said, Peterson loves the rhetorical patterns of demagogues. He loves that when they said something and got roars of approval, they repeated it more loudly, and then honed in on the subset of things that got them the biggest roars.

That’s all Peterson is doing. Saying things that his audience loves to hear, reveling in their roars of approval, then repeating himself.

And since his audience is mostly younger, white, conservative men, and that audience has a strong tendency to be climate change deniers and to love trolling liberals, when he says ‘climate change stoopid’, they roar their approval.

Given that he makes a very good income out of this audience, just as Shapiro and Coulter do, this is actually smart, even if venal, ugly, and intellectually dishonest. But Peterson has shown every evidence of venality and intellectual dishonesty while spouting often ugly things — enforced monogamy anyone? — he later pretends were misunderstood for a couple of years. This is just par for the course.

Young, white, conservative men are the root of the problem, I suspect. Of a lot of problems. And it’s wealthy, older white men who are feeding them the poison.