James D. Watson was the man among modern humans who should have been more "without excuse" than any other as being the first to see the Codes of the DNA molecule....yet he hardened his heart.
"No scientist, no human being, could leave a more tortured and contradictory legacy than geneticist James D. Watson, co-discoverer in 1953 of the elegant structure of the DNA molecule. He died this month at age 97.
A noxious atheist, Watson unwittingly pointed the way toward
A noxious racist, citing supposed genetic evidence of African racial inferiority, Watson’s work with DNA suggests that human beings can’t in fact be reduced to “genes.”
No one could deny the beauty of the DNA molecule’s double helix, for the revelation of which Watson with his partner Francis Crick shared the Nobel Prize.
Atheism literally means just the negation of theism, or belief in a deity. Watson’s atheism, on the other hand, was no mere negation. It was an acid bath.
“Every time you understand something,” he announced in 2003 on the 50th anniversary of his discovery with Crick, “religion becomes
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The notion of our assuming the place of God, as “human gods,” charmed him. In 2000, he said, answering doubts about genetic engineering, “But then, in all honesty, if scientists don’t play god, who will?”
There was a nihilism to his views. As he told fellow atheist scientist Richard Dawkins, in Dawkins’s 2006 book The God Delusion, human existence is purposeless: “Well I don’t think we’re for anything. We’re just products of evolution.”
MindMatters
