I'll be the one to sacrifice my Internet Points by bringing up the notion that the question of who discovered DNA's structure is not nearly as important as is the question of why the question of who discovered DNA's structure is significant. It is, of course, primarily and famously the specter of the erasure of women from scientifically and socially significant developments, the thematic subject that this article addresses.
There is another aspect of this significance, however, in the way that James Watson's impropriety - in his work, and in his telling of the story of his work - reflects on, and is reflected by, his later racist and sexist intellectual misadventures. The myth of a singular - well, dual - genius who moves humanity forward lends credence to his bigotry - how can the father of genetic science be wrong about the influence of genetics on society? - while the truth dashes that credibility (without necessarily undoing the significance of his actual contributions). And it is a controversy that gets re-litigated perennially not because people truly care that much about the discovery or discovers, but because our understanding of these events underpin beliefs, our understanding of the world, that are as sharply relevant today as a shard of glass.
To retreat to attempting an exhaustive reconstruction of events might be comfortable, but it is also a bit dangerous - it assumes a totality of understanding that may be found wanting - and, more importantly, it misses the core of why the controversy exists in the first place. Peer esteem may be foremost on an academic's mind, but we've long left the ivory tower on this one.
Is there any reason to believe that they would have been more generous in giving credit had the work been from a man? And are there not dozens of other researchers who Watson and Crick drew inspiration and results from, who are not listed on the Nobel Prize?
> Is there any reason to believe that they would have been more generous in giving credit had the work been from a man?
The what-ifs of one specific notable instance doesn't really matter. This is merely being used for illustrative purposes.
It is also the case that it is not just women who are denied credit, but until relatively recently it was common practice to not even think to give equal credit to women.
> And are there not dozens of other researchers who Watson and Crick drew inspiration and results from, who are not listed on the Nobel Prize?
This direct? No. Franklin generated the key bit of information from which anyone generally adept in the discipline of the time could verify the double-helical nature of DNA.
I think you misunderstood. In referring to "truth", I wasn't addressing the veracity of Watson's statements (which, however you come down on that, were objectively racist, in the sense of making judgments based on race). I was talking about his impropriety, the truth of which even TFA admits (even if it emphasizes his attempts to later "correct" the record). Watson used a colleague's work in a way that appears less than on-the-level. Watson misrepresented the events of the discovery in which he played a major part. That is what would lead a dispassionate observer, without bias, to reasonably question his statements, especially ones which we are expected to accept, in part, based on the strength of his record.
He was making a prediction of capability, based on attributes which he chose to couch in terms of race, and which have inconclusive applicability to the capability in question. Notably, those attributes are known to be affected by, as opposed to the cause of, the outcomes which that capability is supposed to effectuate.
Did reality also hand these "truths" to him? Or are they, too, "just opinions"?
> 2000: During a guest lecture at the University of California Berkeley, Watson shared his belief that thin people are unhappier than larger people, and therefore harder-working. He also said: “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
> In that same lecture, the Chronicle reported, Watson commented on the (nonexistent) link between sun exposure (and darker skin color) and sexual prowess: “That’s why you have Latin Lovers. You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.”
> 2007: In an interview with Esquire, Watson said, “some anti-Semitism is justified.” He continued: “Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can’t be criticized, that’s very dangerous.”
> In the same interview, he asked, “Why isn’t everyone as intelligent as Ashkenazi Jews?” and suggested that rich people should be paid to have children because “[i]f there is any correlation between success and genes, IQ will fall if the successful people don’t have children.”
> 2012: Of women in science, he said at the EuroScience Open Forum in Dublin, “I think having all these women around makes it more fun for the men but they’re probably less effective.”
If you’re referring to Watson’s 2007 claim that Africa is unlikely to succeed n part because of the inhabitants’ inferior intelligence, as the “truth” he is speaking to “power” perhaps it is you who are biased.
The problem is that all our empirical data back up his (quite mild) point of view, whether we like it or not. I don't like it and don't think he does either.
> is not nearly as important as is the question of why the question of who discovered DNA's structure is significant.
I feel there's a push now to go find people of the right race or gender that were adjacent to scientific achievement and somewhat exaggerate their contributions or their importance. Like Ada Lovelace or Katherine Johnson. There's even a British government employee who decided to write 1000+ wikipedia pages for early career scientists of the same gender as her [0].
I don't know how this trend is going to look back in retrospect, because to me this could have the side effect of reinforcing impostor syndrome for people of the same demographics.
> how can the father of genetic science be wrong about the influence of genetics on society?
Don’t wait long. Please educate yourself. His claim that “Africans” have inferior intelligence due to their genetics has precisely zero basis in scientific evidence.
Would you be able to prove it? Which is more likely?:
>A less-intelligent population has conspired to control the activities of an institution in which they are famously underrepresented (even when considering their status as a numerical minority).
>Investigations have been funded and actually taken place in the past, with the results being inconclusive, or unremarkable, or having falsified the hypothesis.
>Suggesting such investigations reflects a misunderstanding of the capabilities of genetic studies as they currently exist. They will not be undertaken because they're fundamentally incapable of answering the question.
In other words, the group that is supposed to be of superior intelligence, and which has the most to gain from a narrative of superiority, maintains, in your view, that they are not superior. Occam's Razor would say that they've come to this conclusion because they've found it to align most neatly with reality.
2. The IQ test may have been specifically designed to be difficult for certain populations, which were comparatively less educated. And those populations are still less educated today. So it's a circular argument.
I find the suggestion that IQ was designed to be racist highly unlikely considering that many studies have shown Asians to have higher average IQs than Europeans. Even in regards to SAT testing, Chinese American immigrants are extraordinarily over represented in upper percentiles.
For your argument to be valid, you would have to show that Chinese immigrants have always had higher than average IQ's (i.e. at the time the IQ test was first designed).
Otherwise, all it means is that Chinese immigrants may have a higher capacity for work/studies (unless you are also arguing that Chinese people have rapidly been evolving intelligence in the last 100 years. And if so, why?). Which may or may not be genetic, but is definitely not the same thing as intelligence.
I could not find that data, but I found this which is also interesting:
Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology who has written an excellent book about intelligence, cites a study that followed a pool of Chinese-American children and a pool of white children into adulthood. The two groups started out with the same scores on I.Q. tests, but in the end 55 percent of the Asian-Americans entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of the whites. To succeed as a manager, whites needed an I.Q. of 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of only 93.
So the Asian advantage, Nisbett argues, isn’t intellectual firepower as such, but how it is harnessed.
Plus, it's well known that one of the most reliable ways of improving IQ (and SAT scores) is to be born in a wealthier family.
At the end of the day, it still not particularly important if different races score higher or lower on measures of intelligence. It is the environment which selects the traits in a population. There is no adaptive advantage to investing in intelligence if your environment does not require it. It would be "dumb" to be "too smart" if that makes sense. The right question is why is the environment selecting for these traits, whether they are passed down genetically or culturally.
Are you saying you don't think it's likely for the test to be designed to make a certain group perform worse than another as long as some groups outside either of those score better than the group that designed the test? Or that if it was actively designed to make one group perform worse than the one who designed the test, it's not racist because some third group scored even better? Neither of those claims sound particularly persuasive to me
Let's put this in the proper context. Many modern studies and analysis show similar disparities in intellectual abilities between ethnicities and races, based on a number of tests designed in the modern day by many different institutions globally. The suggestion that IQ tests are on the whole are a racist ploy is very conspiratorial.
Furthermore, it's pretty hard to imagine how one would design visuospatial and pattern matching problems so that they are discriminatory.
> Let's put this in the proper context. Many modern studies and analysis show similar disparities in intellectual abilities between ethnicities and races, based on a number of tests designed in the modern day by many different institutions globally. The suggestion that IQ tests are on the whole are a racist ploy is very conspiratorial.
The parent comment that original suggested this claim linked to an article tracing the academic influences of the I.Q. test and other similar standardized testing frameworks, and it doesn't seem "very conspiratorial" to me in the absence of any specific critiques.
> Furthermore, it's pretty hard to imagine how one would design visuospatial and pattern matching problems so that they are discriminatory.
Maybe my imagination is more active than yours, but it doesn't seem that hard to imagine for me. Broadly speaking, I'd imagine that the process of coming up with any sort of test like this would consist of the following steps:
1. Come up with potential questions for the test
2. Assess people with the test in a controlled environment
3. Revise the set of questions based on the results of step 2, then repeat steps 2 and 3 until you're satisfied
To tailor the results to a certain group, give the test to both people in and outside of that group in step 2, then in step 3 revise the questions towards the type that the favored group scored better on (e.g. throw out questions that the disfavored group scored better on, come up with more questions similar to the type that the favored group scored better on, etc.).
You wouldn't be guaranteed to find a set of questions that ended up statistically favorable to the favored group, but it certainly doesn't seem very hard to imagine it might work sometimes, and for it to have happened, it only would need to have worked once.
there is no “the I.Q. test” there are many different ones, designed differently, the article distorts this, and attacks the original Stanford-Binet test as if it was the universe of IQ testing, and even there the entire substance of its attack on that test, delivered in meandering back and forth where it drifts in and out of discussing the SAT and other tests, seems to be that a researcher who later was influential in developing other tests also wrote their dissertation about the same work by Alfred Binet that a completely different researcher leveraged in developing what became the Stanford-Binet IQ test was a eugenicist who thought that blacks and other races were inferior and that testing supported this. Which isn’t just ad hominem, its ad hominem directed at someone not even involved in the development of the test. There is literally nothing in the piece actually arguing for any ill-motive, much less actual scientific flaw, in IQ testing.
There are some real issues that the article hints at – particularly regarding school rankings – but they spent a lot of time trying to juxtapose negative things with various tests that they had no real argument about and just hoped to use guilt-by-(often strained)-association to impugn.
The fact that Europeans "specifically designed" a racist test to make all other races look dumb, but then failed when Asians took it, may in-and-of-itself be an indicator of the relative intelligence of the races.
Please then provide some references to the e literature you’ve read supporting your claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof as the saying goes.
Claiming that the skills tested by IQ tests are in part heritable—like height, strength, weight, eye color and every other physical characteristic—is not an extraordinary claim. Indeed, the opposite claim would be more extraordinary. Why should this be the exception to the rule?
It would be far more beneficial to equity to push back on the purported implications of this fact than to try to fight a losing battle against reality. The value we place on the skills that IQ tests measure is highly suspect and should be questioned, not the idea that IQ varies between populations.
>The value we place on the skills that IQ tests measure
It's not even that. Imagine there is an isolated population on a remote island that is legitimately very low on general intelligence, "nobody can ever learn to count past ten" kinda low, yet undeniably human.
What would be a reasonable policy toward such people?
To apologise for such a unidimensional interpretation of intelligence? Maybe they harness their intelligence to survival in their environment. What would the measure of such an intelligence be? What if you've never been posed a logical puzzle before, or even had a written language, just oral tradition. Are we saying that the western definition of intelligence discounts all other forms of mentation and application of that mentation to significant survival advantage? Perhaps these people score low on "curiosity" rather than intelligence per se? How do we even define intelligence in these discussions? Is Elon Musk intelligent? By some measures, clearly yes. By others, clearly not. What is the point of these discussions of not to partition the room? Personally, I'd like to see a broad-spectrum array of measures relating to different modes of mentation. Then we may be able to get somewhere. Until then, whenever I see a discussion mentioning "whites", "blacks", "Asians", "Africans" as if these are a homogenous mass (which is utterly ludicrous), then I'll continue to suspect ulterior motives.
A lot of assumptions here. What intellectual advantages do chimpanzees have over humans?
Their survival advantages over us are in other planes. Clearly at some stage between the last common ancestor and us there was an intellectually inferior, yet more or less human.
Sure they could maybe sleep naked in the cold, run marathons in 1:30 or even, as a facet of mental ability, have superhuman reaction time, but they would just have no place in the human society.
Your refusal to even consider a genetically defined human subset of inferior intellect is quite typical, I suppose because you don't like the conclusions for if it existed.
Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112-115. This has been seen in many studies (Backman, 1972; Levinson, 1959; Romanoff, 1976), although a recent review concludes that the advantage is slightly less, only half a standard deviation Lynn (2004).
The fact that none of the cited sources (Backman, 1972; Levinson, 1959; Romanoff, 1976) provide evidence of or back the that Ashkenazi IQ is close to a standard deviation above the European average might be why that paper is controversial.
While what you say logically makes sense, it's very difficult to handle the thought for most people. Most people are either racist and disagree with the latter part of what you say, or are anti-racist and reject even the possibility of any intelligence disparity.
I find it uncomfortable, and I personally don't accept it as a fact (there is pretty significant evidence that points at many possible conclusions, as well as many many confounding factors), but I can't, as a reasonable person, reject the possibility.
I would never even voice that opinion in public, though. Even a position like this could make me a social pariah.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc/10.1.1.372.6092
Meta-analysis of the results of over six million participants tested for cognitive ability or aptitude that found a difference in average scores between Black and White individuals of 1.1 standard deviations.
If you truly believe your extraordinary claims, you must believe these countries performed large scale human genetic engineering during these periods in a conspiracy hidden from the rest of the world.
I'm claiming that if they were properly educated, their intelligence would increase. Indeed, the gap between black American IQs and white American IQs has been steadily closing, with a 1/3 reduction between 1972 and 2002, the gap between black American IQs and white American IQs is smaller than the gap between black African IQs and white American IQs, and black Americans in 1995 have the same IQ as white Americans in 1945. This is explainable by reduction in school segregation and increases in white collar job opportunities for blacks in the US, leading to slow increases in education culture in black communities. There is a nutritional component as well, with the average heights of black males almost catching up to the average height of white males: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Height-cm-of-Americans-b...
IQ can be measured quite well at the age of 10-11, before the children have had much education. It also turns out to be quite stable... and doesn't really go up if somebody goes all the way to a bachelor's degree.
This means that your education excuse either isn't true at all (most likely) or that it has really, really important, huge, big, great confounders (highly unlikely).
Your height figure tells me that there really isn't much of a height difference between whites and blacks in the US. There is a clear (but small) height difference between age cohorts but it is utterly dwarfed by the differences between age cohorts in South Korea and Japan (and by the height differences between North Korea and South Korea).
This means that your nutrition excuse either isn't true at all (most likely) or that it has really, really important, huge, big, great confounders (highly unlikely).
Or maybe Watson was on to something, whether we like or not. You clearly don't, I don't either, and I am pretty sure Watson doesn't like it one bit either.
> IQ can be measured quite well at the age of 10-11, before the children have had much education.
That's utter nonsense that children have not had much education at the age of 10-11. I've personally seen kids reading books independently at the age of two (because their parents taught them, not because their genes made them know how to read). Yes, black two year olds can do this too: https://abc7ny.com/2-year-old-mensa-american-kashe-quest-iq-.... By the time they're 11, they're doing college level mathematics. The intelligence gap is vast versus cousins who were not brought up the same way.
Even today, black children have higher childhood exposure to lead and higher incidence of iodine deficiency, both of which have large impacts on IQ. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33394180/
Despite the strong evidence against it, white men (like you and Watson) are much more likely to believe in large genetic differences in intelligence by race, and that is either due to genetic mental deficiency among white men (highly unlikely) or racism in developmental environment (most likely).
> That's utter nonsense that children have not had much education at the age of 10-11.
In that case, the IQ measured later, say at 30, should be very different from the IQ measured at age 10-11. It isn't, though...
It should also go up (a lot) if the kid ends up with lots of education compared to a child with the same childhood score that doesn't end up with lots of education. It doesn't, though.
> It should also go up (a lot) if the kid ends up with lots of education compared to a child with the same childhood score that doesn't end up with lots of education. It doesn't, though.
Of course it does. Did you fail to verify your claim prior to making it because of genetic mental deficiency (highly unlikely) or due to environmental racism leading you to believe that it couldn't be possible (most likely).
> each additional year of mediocre classroom education is worth ~5 IQ points.
"we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education"
1-5 is not 5. Besides, it is contradicted by the Lothian Birth-Cohort Studies (and many others).
You should not misrepresent your sources. On the other hand, it is good you have started citing real research instead of Mother Jones. Ritchie is a real, serious researcher, whether he is right in this case or not.
You failed to understand the study. The 1 case is the marginal effect of a year of education on students who were about to drop out of school, which is a very special type of unmotivated population. 5 is for an additional year of compulsory "mediocre classroom" education on the entire population of students. Is your failure to understand due to genetic inability (highly unlikely) or due to your strong priors influenced by racism in development environment forcing you to conjure up a favorable interpretation for your argument (much more likely)?
The Lothian Birth-Cohort studies were not designed to measure genetic differences in mental ability by race nor to measure the impact of education on mental ability, and your article does not claim it was nor draw any conclusions in that regard. It merely shows a correlation of 0.66 between mental ability at age 11 vs. age 79, which leaves a lot of variability to be explained by environment after age 11. Multiple studies have shown that intentional changes in educational environment cause large differences, with Bloom's 1-on-1 educational coaching causing the largest differences of two entire standard deviations, the difference between median and genius ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
I don’t see anything in that met analysis relating to genetics. This is far more likely to be as a result of systemic racism in your country affecting outcomes from early learning onwards.
That's not a genetic study. The authors specialize in organizational/management science. For the Wikipedia article, you should read it yourself. A ctrl-f for "no evidence" would do you well.
I fail to see how insulting the authors academic credentials brings more to this discussion than critiquing the methodology or providing a study to the contrary.
I also have read the Wikipedia article and have no idea what you are talking about. Claiming there is "no evidence" to any of the sides of this very complex issue is utterly ridiculous.
If the contention is that there is a genetic basis for differences in intelligence, a study that doesn't consider genetic evidence is a poor place to start. This is a methodological critique.
From the article:
>Mackintosh, Nisbett et al. and Flynn have all concluded that the slight correlation between g-loading and the test score gap offers no clue to the cause of the gap.[86][87][88] Further reviews of both adoption studies and racial admixture studies have also found no evidence for a genetic component behind group-level IQ differences.[89][90][91][92]
The poster I originally responded to claimed there was "no scientific evidence" for differences in IQ being based on genetics. There is significant evidence for genetics being the largest reason for IQ differences between individuals. Regardless of the semantics of the quote you posted, a reading of the full article elucidates that there is an open debate as to what role genetics plays in group differences in IQ, with lots of varying opinions and evidence.
I would theorize that this is related to poverty though (and all of the issues that stem from it) and not DNA & genetics. It's also been shown that our environment does change our DNA[1][2]
No, it's the people who insist that IQ must be the sole example of a physiological characteristic that has no genetic component who feel threatened by the science.
To be clear, I fiercely oppose racism in all forms, but the battle should be up against the idea that there's some inherent value in IQ scores, not against the idea that genes play a role in the scores.
the battle should be up against the idea that there's some inherent value in IQ scores
IQ is a predictor of academic achievement, job performance, income, health, and inversely correlates with criminal behavior. But if only we could find some value in it!
IQ isn't a physiological characteristic. It's a measure of intelligence, which is itself a phenomenon that rests on top of cognition, which rests on top of consciousness, which somehow (we're not sure how) rests on top of the physiology of the nervous system. There may well be a genetic component to that physiology, but it's an unscientific assumption that that component is the deciding factor in race-level differences in measures of IQ. It's also not the sole example to commonly fall to this fallacy. Polygenic traits are not so simple.
> IQ isn't a physiological characteristic. It's a measure of intelligence, which is itself a phenomenon that rests on top of cognition, which rests on top of consciousness, which somehow (we're not sure how) rests on top of the physiology of the nervous system.
So... it's fundamentally physiological. We just don't know the details of how the physiology gives rise to conscious thought.
> that component is the deciding factor in race-level differences in measures of IQ
I never said that it's the deciding factor and most people don't. What irks me is when people discount it as being a factor at all. Everything in biology is a complex interaction of genetics and environment, and IQ is no different.
> IQ isn't a physiological characteristic. It's a measure of intelligence
See, this is exactly my point—your line of argument does more to support racist claims than it does to dethrone them. You're arguing a position that cannot be seriously defended while giving credence to a claim that is fundamentally flawed. The idea that there is some discrete quantity called "intelligence" that can be measured by a test and that causes some people to be more successful (whatever that means) than others is a far more vulnerable position to attack than the idea that our consciousness is influenced by our physiology, and I'm not sure why you picked that windmill to tilt at.
I would rather ask more questions before deciding on my doctor.
How well do they listen to me? Are they willing to give me time, or do they treat their patients as an assembly line? Do they continue to read up on new research, or are they relying on their 30-year-old med school degree? Are they someone that I'd be comfortable talking to about very personal matters?
None of these questions have anything to do with IQ, and I frankly have a hard time thinking of an IQ-related question that would matter to me in selecting a doctor.
Let's make the question more tricky. All you know are two things:
* One doctor is white, one doctor is black
* One of them has IQ 90, the other has IQ 150
You are allowed to choose based on this information only.
(I am what many people would call an "alt righter" and I would choose the doctor with IQ 150). I'm curious how other demographics would answer (white liberals, etc.)
Quite. It is likely true that deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined what's commonly referred to as Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics. Revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility, and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of "objectivity".
It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality", no less than social "reality", is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.
To be fair, if you want to go drown in the cosmic ocean of unbeing, I don't think anyone, hegemon or no, is stopping you but your own self-imposed linguistic and social structures.
It is ultimately an irony that the epistemological position--that Civilization is fundamentally about domination and cannot stand marginalized or dissident narratives--has only and could only flourish under civilizations in their least-connected-to-quotidian-life institutions. It requires being sheltered to recognize that ultimately everything is a social and linguistic construct. Everyone else doesn't have the luxury and are just trying to survive.
Even further, the idea that everything reduces to social and linguistic games isn't new. It is one of the oldest ideas in history found in both Buddhism (through depedent coarising) and in Graeco-Roman philosophy culminating in Christianity (the Logos). Both institutions developed monasticism for precisely the same reasons.
This world isn't real. You have to be out of this world to see the illusion behind it and to be free from it.
Everyone does not have to stop pretending it's real for you to stop pretending it's real.
I have to say, I am slightly disappointed that the opening of Sokal's "Transgressing the boundaries" paper isn't immediately recognizable by an HN audience ...
Studying, say, the food preferences of snails, is a very roundabout way to dominate society. A lot of the post-structuralist way of thinking comes down to a couple of obvious claims:
- "Scientists were part of a society that did Bad Things(tm) like genocide, slavery etc." Yes, indeed they were. Thanks for pointing out. This is not as profound a revelation as you might think.
- "Physical reality is just another discourse among many. There's no objective truth." This applies equally to just about any claim, including this second point denying privileged narratives. So why bother having a conversation? It's obviously a self-immolating belief system. There's in fact physical truth and reality. The phenomenon we describe as gravity will be around long after humans are no longer around to contemplate it. Also I'd argue that the post-modern argument is nihilistic. Just because you don't believe in my existence or choose not to articulate it in your "text" doesn't mean I don't exist. If we deny the power of language to represent and communicate reality, all we're left with is raw destructive brute force to decide what is real and who actually exists. Kind of like the USA we are slowly converging upon.
There is another aspect of this significance, however, in the way that James Watson's impropriety - in his work, and in his telling of the story of his work - reflects on, and is reflected by, his later racist and sexist intellectual misadventures. The myth of a singular - well, dual - genius who moves humanity forward lends credence to his bigotry - how can the father of genetic science be wrong about the influence of genetics on society? - while the truth dashes that credibility (without necessarily undoing the significance of his actual contributions). And it is a controversy that gets re-litigated perennially not because people truly care that much about the discovery or discovers, but because our understanding of these events underpin beliefs, our understanding of the world, that are as sharply relevant today as a shard of glass.
To retreat to attempting an exhaustive reconstruction of events might be comfortable, but it is also a bit dangerous - it assumes a totality of understanding that may be found wanting - and, more importantly, it misses the core of why the controversy exists in the first place. Peer esteem may be foremost on an academic's mind, but we've long left the ivory tower on this one.