The helpers deciding where the rest of us ought to go is at the root of some of the concerns about Watson's comments. Having something of a history as a stirrer I'm the last to criticise stirring as an activity and I too remember the scorn with which Wegener's ideas were rejected by high profile geologists until plate tectonics was introduced as a mechanism for continental drift.

But just because Watson was on the inside of a team that discovered the structure of DNA (while the woman whose work was seminal to their understanding was kept out of the team) doesn't mean that he has the understanding to deal with the moral, social and political implications of genetic engineering of the human population. He belongs to a generation that argued strenuously that science was 'value free', without understanding that the ways one asks questions and even the very questions one thinks of as askable are largely determined by one's upbringing and cultural context.

Of course different populations will have different strengths that will have been selected for in different contexts; how we distinguish between those strengths and then apply "value" to each of those strengths is the problem. Watson has not shown any evidence of understanding such issues.

Cheers, Rowan