Inject some intelligence into the race debate

I am taking part this week in a debate on race and intelligence at the Science Museum, nine months after the Nobel Laureate James Watson was banned from speaking there, thanks to some incendiary comments he made about race and intelligence. "I am inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa," he told the Sunday Times. "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours ­ whereas all the testing says not really."

Censure was swift and universal. Watson was stripped of his chancellorship of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in New York. The Science Museum cancelled his lecture because Watson's comments had "gone beyond the point of acceptable debate".

The row over Watson's comments illustrates how much is wrong with the current debate about race. Watson got his