James D. Watson: A Beautiful Yet Ugly Yet Beautiful Legacy

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.

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.”

Yet, uncovering DNA’s structure led Crick to his sequence hypothesis, the realization that DNA was a chemically expressed code or language, dependent on a specific sequence, just like the sentence you are currently reading.

We know of no case where language does not arise ultimately from an intelligent writer or speaker. Even AI algorithms, without intelligence in themselves, trace back to the intelligent programming of human beings.

That DNA codes for structures in the cell (proteins) suggests the existence of a purposeful coder outside nature. Watson’s work refutes his own corrosive atheism.

His thinking on race was similarly demoralizing. He endeared himself to the racist Alt-Right with newspaper musings in 2007: “All our social policies are based on the fact that [African] intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.”

Ensuing outrage forced him from his perch at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and cost him all his honors there, even imperiling his ability to earn a living. In a humiliating gesture, he had to sell his golden Nobel medal through Christie’s (for $4.1 million).

In 2019 he renewed his remarks, stating that “There’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. I would say the difference is genetic.”

It was bad timing for the cancelled James Watson that all this came as early as it did. The Alt-Right is now better known as the “Woke Right,” and in 2025, the most horrific racism, or anti-Semitism, gets a pass from podcasters and political grandees if the person platforming it is famous enough.

Yet again, however, Watson defeated his own worst self.

Although DNA codes for proteins and has other functions, it has become clear that the code represents only a small portion of the genetic information of life.

When calculated, physical genetic information must, for cellular operation, be supplemented by an “immaterial genome” not residing in the cell. Biologist like Michael Levin, with appointments at Harvard and Tufts Universities, speak of this genome’s existence in a “Platonic” realm transcending DNA.

And thus transcending race.

The simple narrative of genetic inheritance is being radically updated, with pseudoscientific racism, supposedly based on it, falling victim to the advance of knowledge.

Watson’s double helix points to much more than he realized: a purposeful design in life, not limited to the remote past when species originated, but operating in our cells at this moment — intelligent design in real time.

Despite his 97 years, James Watson did not live to see his own best, and worst, ideas fully revised. Young scientists may be more fortunate.

David Kinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and author most recently of Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.