The Watson Affair Race and Intelligence

The recent furore over James Watson's idiotic musings on race and intelligence illustrates the continuing hold on the public imagination of simplistic views of genetic causality.
Put simply, Watson went public with his claim that intelligence might (just might) be linked to race. As usual this was further mangled in media coverage to become the suggestion that intelligence is genetically linked to race.

As Steven Rose points out in his trenchant reply to Watson's nonsense the largely arbitrary (in biological terms) category of race is not the sort of thing that can be fruitfully understood in genetic terms. The shocking thing about Watson's intervention is that anyone with High School biology ought to know that.
For some reason, Rose's suggestion that Watson not even be given airspace has blown this into an issue of free speech. I suppose that anyone is entitled to make an idiot of themselves in public and the internet provides us with ample opportunities. I personally think that it is more an issue of responsibility in media coverage of science issues. On this issue, see Ben Goldacre's wonderful Bad Science website.
The next time someone parrots a claim about a genetic basis for this or that behaviour, press them on the question: at what locus is the supposed gene, which alleles are implicated, what role does RNA play in the encoding and decoding of the supposed gene, what other developmental resources (including environmental ones) are involved in the alleged gene's expression and so on? Invariably the claim will be modified to some vague reference to heredity.

Clearly there is a genetic basis to skin colour but not in the way most racists would suppose. White people (or as a former Japanese girlfriend of mine preferred 'pink' people) are mutants who are unable to produce sufficient melanin- hence the prevalence of skin cancers in Australia, where I live. Fortunately for us, our ancestors migrated (or were more likely driven out for being annoying) to places like England and Ireland, where the chances of skin cancer were negligible. Skin colour is one of the most obvious examples of the phenomenon of gene-culture co-evolution, along with lactose intolerance and sickle-cell anemia. It is good to have someone like Steven Rose who can hit the genetic reductionists where it hurts- in the lab.