This article by David Klinghoffer is republished from Science and Culture.

My Substack essay on the passing of James D. Watson is up now:

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 scientific evidence of a creator.

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.

Such renown, for those who experience it, offers a profound choice for good or evil.

Some famous scientists use their fame to uplift others. Some, like certain famous podcasters I can think of, use it to discourage and degrade. Watson fell more into the latter category than the first.

An acid bath

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 less likely.”

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?”

In a 2003 book he wrote, “Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours.”

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.”

Read the rest at “James D. Watson: A Beautiful Yet Ugly Yet Beautiful Legacy.”