Francis Crick was born on June 8, 1916 and named for Francis Galton. He died in 2004.

Back in 2008 I blogged:

Besides Everest-conquerors Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, another famous pair of names forever linked with the year 1953 are the discoverers of the structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick. The Englishman Crick is usually considered the greater theoretical genius of the two, although Watson, before his recent firing for political incorrectness on the race-IQ issue, displayed an amazing knack for getting people to get important things done, despite (or perhaps because of) his irascible personality.

Watson has, of course, been in the news lately, getting dumped from his post as chancellor of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory. Now, a reader has pointed out to me that Watson’s elder partner, Crick (1916-2004), was also guilty of holding the same views on race and IQ.

Some of the Francis Crick Papers are now online, and they are certainly illuminating. For example, during the controversy in 1969-1971 over IQ and race launched by Arthur Jensen’s 1969 Harvard Education Review article and William Shockley’s call for financial incentives and penalties to encourage higher IQ reproduction, Crick, a strong supporter of Jensen, threatened to resign as a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences if steps were taken to “suppress reputable scientific research for political reasons.”

In contrast, in 2007 almost nobody stood up for James Watson.

Really, isn’t it about time that we dig up the bones of Crick and fire him? How can we live with ourselves knowing that there are thought criminals who escaped their just rewards by the trick of dying before we could properly humiliate them?