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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:29
Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports | Jon Entine and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine Radio.
Hope you're doing well. Thrilled to have John Entine on the show.
He is the founder of the Genetic Literacy Project and also the author of seven books, including one that was published in 2000 and still remains in print due to voracious reader interest called Taboo, Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It.
And we have a wide-ranging conversation on human biodiversity and some of the genetic factors that influence various athletic achievements in the world.
And if you're interested in human biodiversity, and I know that I am, and I know that a lot of you are as well, I hope that you'll take time to sit and watch and listen to this great interview with John Antine.
Well, thanks, of course, a lot for taking the time today, John.
So...
Your first major book, Taboo, Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It, came out in 2000.
So here we are, 15 years later.
The book could almost drive it with a person and it still seems like it's really hard to talk about it.
I wonder if you could just give people the central thesis of the book and then we'll sort of dive into some of the political challenges of bringing this topic up.
That's fascinating. From a genetic science point of view, it's actually a pretty uncontroversial book and frankly when this book first came out, the science reviews were uniformly positive and all the problematic reviews came from cultural anthropology centers and others who worried about the dangers of talking about human differences.
The fact is we had the Human Genome Project in 2000.
We've identified that Our commonalities are far more important than the differences, but that doesn't mean we don't have distinct differences.
And in fact, the whole reason for the Human Genome Project was to identify differences in diseases, disease proclivities, that actually show up from population to population.
Ashkenazi Jews get Tay-Sachs disease.
People of African descent get Syracuse.
Sickle cell, almost every population group that's intermarried has certain diseases.
Well, I just applied the same scrim and looked at athletics and found out, whoa, whatever your evolutionary history traces to, that shaped your body type, that shaped your metabolism, and woe is me to people who don't understand human genetics, but it means that Different body types succeed in different sports and the dominance of blacks in certain sports and frankly whites in others is really a product of evolution.
We shouldn't say that because we're all created equal in America, but the fact is that's the genetic reality and it's frankly not controversial from a science point of view, but don't bring it up in other circles.
Well, it is a funny thing, and I've had some experts on the show, and I've made this case myself, that some group always has some problem with science.
Like, they're very pro-science until it hits a core belief, and then suddenly they get all inquisitional and medieval on everyone.
And, of course, on the right, it tends to be among the more sort of heavily Christian influence.
There's some problems with evolution.
But on the left, it really is this sort of racial differences, because you really can't explain Or you really can't accept the tenets and preferences of evolution unless you're going to accept that there are localized adaptations to very different environments.
And of course, the people who stayed in Africa, if the out-of-Africa hypothesis is correct, the people who stayed in Africa had to adapt to a particular environment.
The people who went to Northern Europe, the people who went to Siberia, wildly different environments.
And here we have like 100 to 150,000 years of localized adaptation to very different environments.
And I was just reading a An article the other day that said bees are adapting to climate change and that's, you know, a decade or two old.
So the idea of hundreds of thousands of years of wildly different environments not producing any changes whatsoever except, you know, very superficial outside sort of hair and skin, it just seems to me incomprehensible.
If you're going to reject that thesis, you kind of have to become a world of 6,000 years old fundamentalist because that seems to me foundational to the whole concept of evolution.
It does. You can understand it though.
I think very few people would deny what you just said.
You laid it out in a very sensible, comprehensive way.
Here's the problem. We are willing to, everyone is willing to, agree that body shape is affected by local evolutionary factors.
We know that a Inuit Indian is going to be short and stubby, and if they relocate to the Bahamas, they're suddenly not going to get long and lean just because they're suddenly in warm weather.
Evolution puts a strong mark on you.
So we kind of understand that.
The problem is the elephant in the room, which is that if evolution shapes body type, then does it shape brain behavior?
And because of the huge debate over things like IQ, disparity in income between Africa and Europe, differences in performance in university-level tests, whether you're from China or Asia or from a European culture or an African culture, all those things are kind of simmering in the background.
So I think that the ones who defend the we are all the same, we're an environmental blank slate, really feel like they're doing a good thing.
They're making a cultural statement that we don't want to prejudice ourselves against any group for something that is a product of nature.
So you can understand why they would be reacting that way to the potential misuse of this kind of data, but it is anti-science fundamentally.
You have to put everything on the table if you're If you're willing to debate the implications of what evolution and science tells us.
Well, I mean, that is a very sensitive way of putting it.
it.
And I, of course, was raised with all of this egalitarianism across all different groups and so on.
And I, you know, I'm hanging on to it, you know, but boy, the science is really, really tough to escape.
And maybe we can talk about the IQ stuff in a bit, but I really wanted to focus on the physicality thing.
A couple of caveats, of course, I think are important to mention first.
When we talk about differences between the races, and I'm sure you'll agree with me on this, but when we talk about differences between races of people, there's no possible implication of superiority or inferiority, that there's no better or worse, right?
There's no better or worse, There's local adaptations.
It's the question of, is a polar bear better than a brown bear?
It is if you've got a white background, so to speak, right?
I guess like me. So it's nothing to do with superiority or inferiority.
It's simply adaptation to localized environments.
So I think that's sort of clear.
So if we're talking about one race having superior skills in a particular area, that has nothing to do with racial superiority.
It's simply a fact.
Chinese people are not overly represented in the NBA, partly because of shortness and other things.
But that doesn't mean that overall blacks are superior to Chinese or Asian people or anything like that.
It's simply the result of localized adaptations.
I just wanted to put that sort of caveat.
The other thing too, of course, you can't judge any individual by any group statistics.
There are tall Chinese people and there are, I guess, Chinese people with very slow reflexes, and we'll talk about that in a bit.
And, of course, there are lots of African-Americans who are terrible at basketball.
So, you can't judge any particular individual, but when you zoom out and you're looking at big Let me add a third caveat,
which is we've got to be really careful in using the term race, because what we know about evolution and local adaptations, words that you've used, we know that it doesn't necessarily break down by the mega-racial categories of black White, Asian, Australasian, so on and so forth. It actually is much more localized than that.
So you go into Africa, for instance, and the genetics, which is the genotype and the phenotype, the genetics is the genotype, the phenotype is what you actually see.
Is different from Eastern Africa to Western Africa.
And although they share certain similarities, they have longer limbs relative to their trunks.
They have denser skeletons.
Those are things that are common across Africa.
But there are huge differences in things like metabolic rates, muscle composition, because of local adaptations.
So when scientists look at this issue, they never use the term race.
They use the term population.
And the term population breaks down into dozens or even hundreds of localized populations in the world.
So I think, again, one of the trouble spots in this is that we aggregate this to the term race and say, oh, blacks are this.
And frankly, people can hit up on my title for saying that as well.
But I made sure not to say that blacks are superior.
And I think you've underscored that.
And in the book, it goes a long way in making the point That these are local things.
You can even have small regions like the hill country in Kenya that because of very peculiar evolutionary characteristics have turned out an extraordinarily high number of middle and long distance runners purely because of local adaptations there.
So with those three caveats, I think let's jump into this.
Yeah, and just to underscore that, I mean, most white people are not drunken, belligerent, excellent writers.
But then, of course, there is the entire population of Ireland.
So I can say that because I was born in Ireland.
It's important to remember that.
Okay, so let's get to the basic thesis.
I think anybody who watches sports at some point is going to notice not a lot of brothers on the swim team and not a lot of Asians on the soccer team and so on.
That there do seem to be areas where particular racial groups tend to cluster.
And again, lots of exceptions and so on.
So I wonder if you could just talk about where you see the clustering, and then we'll jump into some of the genetic potential reasons behind that.
Yeah, let's look at swimming as an example, because there is an example where blacks don't dominate at all.
And of course, there's a cultural factor in all of these things.
You don't see a lot of blacks in the National Hockey League in the United States, or frankly in any hockey league, because blacks...
Are underrepresented in cold climates, and so you're not going to see the numbers there because there's just not the numbers to draw from to try out for the teams.
And I don't think there's any reason why blacks would not be highly represented in a sport like hockey, for instance.
There's nothing about their muscle composition, metabolism, something like that that would suggest they wouldn't do just as well in that as they do, let's say, in football.
But swimming is a different...
We know there are certain things that really benefit you in swimming.
One is if you're more buoyant, and we know that blacks have less natural body fat.
Again, this is an average, not any individuals.
There's plenty of plump Africans, but overall, the African, natural African body type has less body fat, and that's an adaptation to being in a very warm environment.
We also know that the blacks have a higher skeletal mass, which means it's heavier, which means blacks are sinkers, and you can talk to any swim coach, and frankly, you can talk to many blacks, and that's a common phrase used to describe people of African ancestry, that they're sinkers, and it's really because a significantly higher percentage of their skeletons are heavier.
That immediately takes at the elite level where a fraction of a second is the difference between being mediocre and being a gold medal winner.
Those kinds of characteristics are really killers.
They really essentially call out a huge number of people who can conceivably compete.
Then there's the other major thing, which is that most Africans competing in swimming are of West African ancestry.
West Africans tend to Really excel in fast-burst activities.
Sprinting, for instance. People of West African ancestry are among the worst long-distance runners in the world.
There are no people of West African ancestry, none, who are internationally level long-distance runners, but they dominate in the 100 meters.
The top 500 100-meter times are all held by a person of West African ancestry.
That's the top 500.
That's a great benefit for really short distances, but almost all swimming events are not We're not aerobic sports.
They're anaerobic sports.
They're sprints. Excuse me, the other way around.
Most swimming is aerobic rather than anaerobic.
So people who have a body type that would excel in the sprints, they could do particularly well maybe in a 20 or 30 second swimming event.
But once you get into the longer events, and most of the events are longer than that, the muscle fiber type that they have just doesn't make them excel.
So the combination of A poor muscle fiber type, a denser body, slender arms.
These things are really killers, and it's a huge explanation for why whites dominate in that sport.
They have a body type, and so the bell curve distribution suggests you're going to draw a lot more whites from the white population who are going to do well in swimming events.
And this element of elitism is really, really important to understand.
We're talking about a tiny sliver of any of the populations who are at the very top tier of ability.
There's a great Jerry Seinfeld bit about running, just how annoying it is if you're just a tiny bit slower.
I mean, you go from gold to last, you know, and the guy's like, if I had a pimple on my nose, I'd have won.
You know, it's literally that close.
So in something like swimming, if you have a heavier bone density, if you even have to Transfer or redirect 1% of your caloric consumption to floating as opposed to going forward.
That's going to take you out of the running at the very top tier.
And that's really, really important.
You don't need a huge advantage.
You don't have to be twice as good.
You have to be like half a percentage point or a quarter of a percentage point better.
We're not talking about massive changes.
There are really tiny adaptations that are huge.
I think there's something in your book where you talk about the Kenyan runners have 7% or 8% better conversion of oxygen to pumping and muscle exercise.
That's huge. That's a relatively small difference, but at the elite levels, the tiny differences are the difference between gold and an also rent.
Yeah, and that also is underscored in running, where you see all the time, you'll see every 100-meter race, 9 out of 10 at least, usually 10 out of 10, will all be persons of West African ancestry.
East Africans and North Africans, their body type is totally antithetical to short-distance running.
And very interesting, they also have a lousy body type for...
Thank you.
love long distance running because they have such a history of it with Kip Kano and all the gold medals they have.
The fact is, is that they're kind of like indifferent about long distance running.
They're incredible soccer fans.
But guess what?
Kenya sucks in soccer.
They don't have the body type for it.
And every East African country is terrible in soccer because they just, again, body type circumscribes possibility.
But when you have the possibility, when you're a good runner, and if you're of West African ancestry, it's more likely you'll pull from that group and the chance that someone from that pool will be a good runner.
Tiny, minuscule differences will separate a high school runner from a gold medalist.
and those are little attributes that show up in body composition, muscle fiber type, and even the size of one's lungs.
People from West Africa have the smallest lung capacity of any population group in the world.
That sounds like a bad thing, but it makes it extremely efficient for anaerobic sports.
It makes it very inefficient for aerobic sports.
And East Africans flipped on the exact opposite side.
Right. I mean, now that we have all of this international travel, it's relatively easy to get from A to Z and back again.
It's hard to remember just how geographically isolated particular human populations were for the vast majority of history.
So the fact that there would be regional differences again would be perfectly well established under the umbrella of localized adaptations.
Now, of course, every time we talk about better or worse capacities, I feel like we're sort of going headlong into the PC storm or current Of pushback.
And let's address this right up front.
So when you talk about hockey, of course, what jumps to my mind, I'm sure it jumps to a lot of people's minds, is, well, hockey is very expensive.
You know, I mean, it's thousands of dollars for the equipment, and every time your kids have a hamburger, you've got to replace the whole thing, because they've grown a quarter of a billionth of an inch.
And so given, of course, that blacks in America have significantly lower socioeconomic status than whites and Asians, could we not say, well, of course, you know, I'm underrepresented in hockey because they don't have the resources or means to participate to the same degree?
Yeah, and frankly, that's a legitimate point.
It even plays up in swimming, actually, because swimming tends to be a sport pursued by more affluent people.
But it goes away completely in the running area.
Running is about as democratic as you can get.
You can win marathons and not even have shoes, as we learned in the Ethiopian win in the 1960 Olympics.
It is literally the flattest, most even playing field in the world where people from every country compete and over time the cream of the natural talent emerges and I think that really is pretty definitive in making it clear that You can literally map it out by different populations, which populations will have a bell curve distribution to do well at different distances.
And this has all been confirmed with measurements.
Olympic level scientists have looked at this kind of thing.
They put out charts about this.
I cannot tell you how in the science world In the physical anthropology world, in the genetics world, this is the most uncontroversial thesis.
It's only controversial because of the history of racial discrimination and the associations that go on with establishing hierarchies based on skin color or other attributes that have really been misused historically.
So the other pushback that I've seen some data to support is not that there's genetics, but it's environmental insofar as, you know, the Kenyan athletes are often growing up in high altitudes, and therefore when they get to the oxygen-rich sea level competition arena, they do much better because there's been some...
I think success in replicating skiers in northern European countries, training at high altitudes, getting some adaptations that you could say are epigenetic or just the way that your body adapts to those kinds of training environments.
So, I mean, and I just want to point out before we answer this, everyone who's listening to this, you're going to have all of these objections popping up in your head.
That's perfectly great, perfectly valid.
But trust me, I mean, it's like when you talk about IQ tests and people say, well, they're culturally biased.
It's like, you don't think researchers have ever thought of that?
I mean, of course, all of these objections pop up in the heads of researchers.
Don't trust us. Do the research yourself.
But this has, to a large degree, been addressed.
So what's the argument that says the particular environment where they train in, nothing to do with genetics, just gives them an advantage?
I remember one old joke that says, boy, if you want to If you want to stop Kenyan dominance in middle distance running, just buy them school buses so that the kids don't end up running back and forth to school every day and thus training at high altitudes.
Yeah, I mean, here's an example where you have a truth that is really a truism in a way.
It really provides you with no information about the overall answer here.
Because there's no question that if you train harder, you're going to be a better athlete.
And if you're used to training at lower distances and you train at high distances, it probably builds up the strength of your lungs.
So sure, you'll improve, but at some point...
You're going to hit your genetic barriers.
You can't go past your genetic barriers.
A female is not going to be able to run as fast as an elite-level male because she doesn't have the muscle mass that a male has.
And frankly, she has too much natural body fat because of the secondary sex characteristics that go along with being a female.
So you hit your genetic...
You're circumscribed by your genetic capabilities.
And so, yes, you're right, but no, that doesn't explain the differences.
Kenya, for example, everyone talks about, oh, the Kenyans run to school.
Well, I interviewed in my book, and you know this, plenty of Kenyans who live right next to the school and never run to school.
Some would say, well, the Kenyans, they naturally train 80 to 100 miles a week.
And I talk to Kenyans who train 5 and 10 miles a week.
They were just born with natural ability.
And I know that's a horrible thing to say because natural ability has been used as a As a metaphor in the United States for saying that someone's kind of lazy and didn't really earn through hard work their achievements.
But it's not used that way in Kenya.
It's pretty much accepted, and in other places as well.
People do have natural abilities, and hard training is not going to turn...
Pete Rose from a singles hitter into a home run hitter.
You are circumscribed by your genetic capabilities, and we know that you can do bell curve distributions on people of East African ancestry, West African, Eurasian whites, Asian populations, and you can graph them against certain sports, and it overlays almost exactly.
You want to say this is a product of the environment?
You can make that claim, but the evidence just doesn't suggest that.
Well, and of course, if you were going to say that people's abilities are dependent on their environment, that goes right back to the...
Evolutionary thesis that says there's local adaptations to specific environmental cues, and it's not just going to happen in one generation.
So I think that it doesn't really add much, but I just really wanted to address it.
Now, as far as winter sports go, again, there's a fantastic bit in the book about bobsledding.
Not naturally something you would expect Jamaicans would be excelling at, but of course they have made some incredible inroads into, at every conceivable level, white sport.
Yeah, and the reason is because the attributes that make you a good bobsledder happen to be the same attributes that make you a good sprinter because the bobsled is almost entirely one on the push, and the push is really a sprinting activity.
So essentially what it is is sprinting and then jumping on a sled.
So if you can bring your sled guiding skills to the level of other competitors, You have a natural advantage as a high-level sprinter in pushing that sled.
So even though the number of Jamaicans or frankly other people of West African descent who competed in that sport are minuscule, If they're at the top of the sprinting game, they immediately translate into being at the top of the bobsled game, and this is shown time and time again.
It doesn't happen the other way.
I mean, one of the very interesting points that we talk about in the book is what happened to the East Germans during the time when East Germany was competing extremely well competitively at the Olympic level on a lot of sports, and where they did most...
Where they did the best was in female-related sports like swimming and weightlifting, where we know that their advantage was almost entirely fueled by the use of steroids.
But steroids and some of those factors don't work so well in things like sprinting.
It's a minor advantage, and it doesn't help on female athletes nearly so much as it helps in male athletes.
I mean, excuse me, it helps on female athletes a lot more than it helps on male athletes because there's a lot more to be gained for a female athlete in taking steroids.
So you got the situation where female athletes improved dramatically by the use of steroids, but even East German male athletes pumping steroids into them could not compete in the sprints against people of West African ancestry, indicating that even with a steroid boost, they couldn't overcome the inherent advantages that someone of East African ancestry has.
That's a great vignette from the 80s Olympics where the Western and rest of the world female gymnasts all freaked out and covered up because they thought men were wandering into their locker because these very deep voices were conversing back and forth.
And of course, in troupe a rather thinly bearded Eastern European gymnastics team that's all female but of course has been...
To some degree modified by hormones to compete.
So let's talk about some of the anatomical differences that have shown up and show up regularly in, you know, the cultural anthropologists are very much like radical egalitarians.
Any difference is purely superficial, has no particular basis below skin and hair.
But the forensic anthropologists, of course, tell a different story, right?
They say, well, you know, just give me a thigh bone, I can give you age, I can give you gender, I can give you race, and recognize the degree to which the bodies of the races have some I wonder if we could just go through a quick bullet point of the major differences, Asian and white and black.
Sure. One quick thing is that, by the way, that even the cultural anthropologists have come around on this.
Stephen Rose, who's one of the most well-known outspoken cultural anthropologists, co-authored a book, Not In Your Genes, and is very, very militant, suggesting that we're a blank slate, did concede that African domination in...
In running sports is a result of local adaptations over many centuries.
So there's some things that, you know, you can't ignore the nose on your face at a certain point.
But in terms of the major differences, clearly body shape, people of Asian ancestry, I mean, people of...
African ancestry tend to be slender body types.
They're adapting to the hot weather and equatorial climates.
They have longer limbs relative to their trunks, which is a way to help dissipate heat, which makes them able to survive in hot weather activities particularly well.
They have very dense muscles.
They have very dense Skeletal systems, all of these contribute to great abilities in running with leverage and with body composition.
There's differences, though, between East and West Africans.
West Africans, which is almost the entire African-American population of the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, pretty much the slave trade was focused on Western Africa.
They tend to have a much A heavier body type on the top, much stronger upper body.
You can look at a Kenyan, for instance, or an Ethiopian.
They tend to be much slender because of different genetic modifications that have come from living in a different altitude.
And they also tend to have, as I said, very dense skeletons.
So what you see in the West Africans and East Africans, West Africans tend to be very good in quick burst activities.
They have a higher percentage of fast twitch muscles.
East Africans have a higher percentage of slow twitch muscles, which are better for...
I'm aerobic activities, and both of them tend to be on literally the opposite sides of the bell curve distribution on that, and whites tend to fall into the middle.
White bodies are a little bit stubbier, shorter arms.
No wonder that every weight event, every field event in the Olympics Are all dominated by people of your Asian ancestry.
That's the weight lifting and in particular shot put, right?
The sort of moving heavy stuff with your upper torso.
Exactly. It fits their body type and people are surprised.
There's something in the United States called the NFL Combine where all the players who are graduating from college are reviewed by all the NFL teams and they go through all these drills.
And among the drills is the 40 yard dash.
Every year, the top 50 finishers are blacks, and there's the weightlifting.
Every year, the top 45 out of the top 50 are whites.
You suddenly think that these African Americans who are not trying so hard in weightlifting, it's really a body type difference that shows up.
Let's look at Asians, though, because that's a particularly prickly issue in trying to understand body type differences and how it applies to sports.
You don't really see Asians dominating any particular sport, though you have now beginning to see emerging because of the economic power and the literal size of China that they're doing much, much better in many, many sports. Many of them, of course, depend on financial investments to do well, and equipment investments and coaching.
But in terms of natural body type, they are not the world's fastest, that we know.
They are not the world's strongest, generally speaking, that we know.
Again, in a bell curve distribution, their body type does tend to be much more flexible.
They just know that by historically looking at Asian body types.
It's well known, let's say, in the gymnastics community and Asians are known for their flexibility.
Some of this is stereotypes, but stereotypes are often grounded in reality.
How much statistical...
Physical anthropology actually supports this is questionable at this point, but you do see Asians do particularly well in a range of gymnastic events, in many, many sports, including diving, where flexibility is an issue.
Again, it's hard to make a case that that's linked to genetic proclivities, but it basically is something that sports scientists are exploring, and we'll know more about it in the years to come.
Well, yeah, because I had a guest on recently who basically made the case that nobody could say that there's any particular genetic reason why, say, Asians would be very good at table tennis or ping pong.
And I'm actually sort of reminded of...
I went to Beijing in 2000 to do business and...
I think we're good to go.
Looking at this again sort of brushes up against the IQ stuff which we can touch on later but one of the ways in which people feel that the IQ test has some validity is it tends the bell curve of IQs among Asians versus other groups or other ethnicities tends to follow reaction times and that Asians tend to have as you say great flexibility and very fast reaction times and given that it's one of the twitchiest games around I could see why there might be some argument as to And these things are way below culture.
These are like a buzzer comes off and you push a button.
That's not culturally sensitive and it tends to show up very early in life at 18 months or as soon as they can test this kind of stuff.
So I could see that there could be an argument to say, well, those kinds of fast reflexes and smaller body sizes would make Asians better at a game like that and not as good at a game like football.
Yeah, I think the one scientific fact that we do have is that Asians do have a quicker reaction time than any other population group.
So again, we're getting into the area of speculation, but it's informed speculation, and it does, again, make sense, but there's also the cultural fact that Asians play more ping-pong than Americans do, so you're going to have a larger pool to draw from.
But to me, this is what's so both excitingly and frustratingly circular.
Is that people say, well, of course, Asians are good at ping pong.
They play ping pong a lot.
It's like, yes, but maybe they play ping pong a lot because they're really good at it.
You know, like, I mean, it's one of these circular things where it's sort of a Mobius strip.
How do you break it out? And genetics has some say in that.
But the purely cultural explanations to me, they're all tautologies.
I think that's the point that you're making.
We know absolutely that genetics plays a key role in how you perform in various sports, and we also know that physical and physiological characteristics are not distributed equally across populations, that they tend to congregate.
Certain qualities, certain capabilities congregate in certain populations more than others.
So those are incontrovertible facts.
Just to then suggest that that would not impact what sports particular population groups would do better at really verges on the absurd.
So let's talk about some of the criticisms that are not genetic, but I guess cultural or racially sensitive criticisms.
I actually did manage to dig up the piece with Tom Brokaw from way back in the day that I think was the original impetus for this.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, somebody says, well, what do you think when you hear the term natural athlete?
And he said, basically, well, what I hear is that people are talking about blacks and they're saying, well, the only reason a black man could succeed in sports is because he's naturally gifted and therefore he doesn't have to work that hard.
It plays into the... The blacks are lazy sort of stereotype, and that was his particular pushback on that.
Now, of course, that doesn't have any relevance to the genetic discussion, but I wanted to get your thoughts on it, because I had a pretty strong reaction to that, which I'll share in a sec, but you've obviously heard that argument involved in the creation of that segment.
I like to put this in historical perspective, which is if you go back to the early 20th century when blacks were pretty much excluded from all sports, there was a general belief that the reason blacks should be excluded from sports is because they're more enfeebled than whites.
There was the tradition of the scholar-athlete Really a British tradition that the athletes who had the most chance to succeeding are the ones who were best educated, clearly because of opportunity, but because there was a general belief that sports ability and intelligence were highly correlated.
Today we have the belief that there's almost an inverse relationship between succeeding in sports and being smart, like jocks are dumber, for instance.
And I think what happened in the early...
20th century. The first blacks who came into the sport were all Ivy League players.
Jesse Owens from places like Ohio State or people from Princeton.
These were all scholar athletes who were involved in one sport or another.
And it was only over time when the immigration flow into the United States changed the picture of American sports.
And instead of being a haven for the British upper class and elite Protestants, it became a place where blacks and Catholics and immigrant Jews competed, and it really changed the nature of sports and changed the way we view it.
So over time, again, that association of being an athlete and being not so bright upstairs became associated with that.
And then we went through the whole racism period in the 50s into the 60s.
And, you know, I am of that generation.
I remember announcers in the 60s would regularly talk about black football players as being white.
He runs like a gazelle.
In fact, Howard Cosell, a famous sports announcer at that time, really a brilliant man and quite open minded in so many ways.
And I think he said it innocently, but there was no question that those kinds of phraseologies, referring to blacks as animals in one form or another, while whites were always described as heady and smart and look how clever they are.
And those were stereotypes that persisted for a long time.
So when we did that documentary in 1989 for NBC, I think that legacy...
Of portraying athletes in general and Blacks in particular, Black athletes in particular, as being dim bulbs really was part of it.
There were no Black quarterbacks, for instance, in the NFL. Maybe there was one at that time.
And clearly, college football, there were a handful at most.
Now, I think those stereotypes have disappeared.
We have Black coaches in football, international football, soccer.
We have... We have general managers.
We have, you know, most of the quarterbacks are African American.
I think many of those stereotypes have disappeared.
And the idea that just because you're a good athlete, you have to be, you know, you have to be stupid has really passed into folklore as a racist myth.
So I think that would be seen a lot differently now than it might have been seen 25, 26 years ago.
Right, right. My sort of response to it was, if we're going to completely ignore Any kind of genetic differences or any kind of aggregate differences between populations.
And again, this is, you know, we always sort of gravitate towards black-white because that's the area of greatest contention.
But again, ethnicities are all over the world and there's lots of variety.
And I kind of like the variety myself.
That to me is sort of, it's, you know, you don't want to go, quote, to a zoo and see one animal.
You want to see lots of different kinds of animals.
animals and the fact that we are as a human species lots of different types of people to me is a great thing.
But what bothered me about that particular segment was he said, well, you know, basically it's taking away the hard work of blacks and saying, well, they just got there because of genetics and therefore they're lazy.
It's like, well, okay, given the vast dominance of blacks in certain areas of sports, what is he saying about the white people?
Is he saying the white people are lazy and just don't work as hard as the So if we ignore the genetics, somebody is going to get dissed, so to speak, because if there is this imbalance that doesn't have anything to do fundamentally with willpower at the very elite levels and, again, with the bell curve distribution, okay, so let's say that the blacks did earn theirs and there's no genetic difference.
Okay, but then that just says that the whites are lazy.
Like, if we take the genetic question out or the exploration of the genetic question out, somebody's going to end up being dissed.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
What's been interesting is the reaction to the book on that particular point by Africans.
I talked to Arthur Ashe before he died about this very, very issue, and Arthur just looked at me in the eye and said, you know, there's no question there's a difference in my mind, and there's no question that blacks have an advantage.
He says, I've seen it.
And when I went and gave speeches around the country, invariably, this is how it broke down.
Scientists, 100% in support of it.
Cultural anthropologists and postmodernist sociologists, 100% against it on ethical grounds that you're violating some kind of...
You know, unwritten thing that you cannot suggest that there are any human differences, the blank slate theory.
And African-Americans about 90 percent in support of it.
And they live through this.
They know the differences. And to talk to an African-American who plays streetball, let's say, with friends and suggest that there aren't differences in quickness, let's say, or jumping ability, when they see it every day and saw it growing up and watch it on TV, is insulting to them.
What they don't want to see is people misusing it and making judgments about other things based on those kinds of generalizations.
And the idea of protecting blacks from themselves is really patronizing, I think.
Well, and one of the most compelling segments of that piece that you did in the 80s was the...
I think he was an Israeli professor, an ex-Olympic athlete himself, who was a kinesiologist.
He studied human motion and so on.
And so he put, just for those who haven't seen it, and again, it's not the easiest thing to get hold of, but he had a sort of jumping test.
People want to contact me, so...
I'm sorry? I said I do have copies of it if people want to contact me.
Well, it's well worth watching. Anyway, so he had a bunch of blacks and a bunch of white basketball players jump and then jump again.
He jumped off a high area onto a step where he could measure the impact and jump.
And the graph of the impact and jump between blacks and whites was wildly...
I thought, okay, it's going to be a little different.
But no, it was very, very different.
And he actually did a blind test.
Where he would say, you know, basically blindfold me, and I'll still be able to tell you who's black and who's white, and he got it right 100% of the time.
That is fairly compelling, to say the least.
It's anecdotal, of course, but it conforms with what we know about the actual scientific evidence.
So in that case, the anecdote really just reinforces everything that the data suggests.
But what was really cool about that, he wasn't saying that blacks jumped higher.
What it showed is their burst off the force plate.
So the point that he was making is that blacks have this fast burst activity, which is something that you can see.
Look at the NFL running backs.
Almost every single NFL running back is of African-American ancestry, and almost every single defensive back is of African-American ancestry.
Almost every center fielder in baseball, almost every shortstop in baseball, all the key, and frankly, 80% of the NBA, Activities that require fast bursts really tend to be people of African-American ancestry, and that's exactly what showed up on that test.
Fascinating. Right.
And you do point out, of course, in the book, and I've read this elsewhere, that when you take muscle samples from elite athletes, you will see different concentrations of the fast twitch muscles.
I think the blacks ended up with twice as many.
That's a pretty powerful physiological difference.
And this is true even of blacks and whites who train together under the same coach, doing roughly the same training regimen and so on.
Right. Again, I mean, this stuff's all like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall because there's an accumulation of evidence.
But of course, until the Human Genome Project is disseminated and the thousands of genes that contribute to just about every physical characteristic are sort of mapped and understood, there's not going to be any clear, unambiguous, like it's now trying to say that the Earth is flat to go back.
But the accumulation of evidence, I think, should be enough that people should keep an open mind and be curious about this, because I think it does matter.
Because the question that comes up a lot, and I get this for myself, because I think that race is a fascinating concept.
I think I'm interested in all that is human, and race is one of the aspects of humanity that people tend to notice first.
And there is, of course, different outcomes for various races in various communities, so it is an important thing to But there is this question of, it's vaguely suspect to even want to study this stuff.
The people who study race and IQ get this question all the time.
What is your malevolent intention in even studying this stuff to begin with?
Why does it matter? Why should we even care?
But that question, which I'd like to get your response to, is sort of mirrored by the fact that if you look at sales of Hernstein's and Murray's The Bell Curve, which for a very academic treatise, I think, went into the hundreds of thousands, which is wildly unusual, people are incredibly fascinated by questions of ethnicity and race and physicality and intellect and so on.
We're very fascinated by it, but at the same time, it's considered to be somehow suspect to even venture into the topic.
I can understand it if the interest is purely trying to understand athletic differences and what we see on the playing field.
That seems a rather thin justification for looking at these things, but that's not the impetus for looking at human differences.
The impetus is medicine.
We want to know why different African populations respond to drugs in a different kind of way.
If you're black and you get...
A bone marrow transplant, there's a high chance it's going to be rejected if that bone marrow is from a white person.
If you're creating drugs, you need to know what a person's genetic ethnicity is because they're tailored.
Personal genomics is tailored based on a person's genetic differences.
So the original studies are all based on understanding medicine.
And understanding physiology.
And frankly, the intelligence differences, no one really started to look at that.
They want to understand how the brain works and how different evolutionary forces affect different parts of the brain and different brain capabilities.
It's ultimately for targeting things like how do you increase IQ in anybody?
They're studying these kinds of things.
How do you address dementia?
But when you get a vast amount of data, they crunch that data in so many different ways.
And one of the ways they do it is across populations to see if there's any factors that might be cultural and might be genetic.
And these things just jump out at you.
So to say, oh, well, we should not...
I talk about these kinds of things because someone may take this data and use it in a way that's inappropriate.
Then you start getting into censorship and I think that's when science goes down a rat hole because you could use that to justify not supporting evolutionary research.
You can use it to not supporting climate change research.
I think we have to be pretty democratic and try to get as much information as possible and see where these avenues take it.
And also remain vigilant, frankly, that people don't misuse this data and make generalizations that are inappropriate.
But let me tell you, this issue is coming out.
We're understanding how the human brain works.
We're understanding how the human body works.
This data is being crunched across population measures, and they're looked upon in all kinds of ways.
This data is coming out.
It will be available if we don't establish a comfortable public discourse now about this.
It's going to be used by people who...
We'll want to use it for nefarious reasons.
I believe in public discourse and getting these issues out there and establishing a framework.
And I'll tell you, African Americans that I've talked to overwhelmingly endorse that way of looking at these issues.
They know that there's hidden racism when these things aren't talked about, and the racism disappears when we do talk about it.
Well, and I think the case has been made, and I've certainly made it on this show, that if a doctor were to practice race egalitarianism, Could be credibly sued for malpractice because, as you pointed out, blacks have a higher incidence of hypertension.
Twice as many blacks as whites die of things like diabetes and prostate cancer.
And one of the reasons, according to cancer researchers, is that blacks have 3-17% more testosterone than whites.
And these are things that you need to figure out.
There's evidence that breast cancer grows faster.
In black women than in white women and that black women or black girls hit puberty earlier than white girls who themselves hit puberty earlier than Asian girls and so on.
These are important things for public health.
These are important things not to put too fine a point in it.
If we're going to be total race egalitarians, we are then not going to do early screening for more particular the Tay-Sachs disease, of course, among Jews, particularly the Ashkenazi Jews.
If we're going to be pure race egalitarians, we're literally going to condemn thousands of people to an early death because we're not going to take into account physiological differences that require more careful attention in some races than others.
Yeah, absolutely. The debate among scientists is when we find things that might be misinterpreted, do we dare go public with it?
And frankly, there are a number of scientists.
There's a... A well-known scientist from the University of Chicago who had published some data about brain differences from African populations to European white populations that suggested there were genetically based differences that could help explain certain kinds of intellectual capabilities.
And he was not looking at it for anything other than for medical reasons, but it emerged from his data.
He was accused of being a racist, and literally he stopped researching in an area that could have yielded a tremendous amount of important information that could be medically valuable purely because his career was on a thin edge for a while.
And that's a shame. We have to have confidence enough that we should pursue research to see where it takes us.
Well, you know, the pursuit of facts, we should take into account emotional discomfort in the pursuit of facts.
But there's very few people who say that we should have stayed with the Earth-centered model of the solar system because the sun-centered model of the solar system was offensive to the popes of the time.
I mean, that would be a ridiculous thing to do.
And we should, of course, pursue the data where the data leads because it could end up reducing social tensions, providing particular cures for diseases that are more prevalent in various ethnic groups and so on.
Now, the IQ thing shows up in your book, and I know the book is not about IQ, but there are these video games that you can play where if you increase one attribute, you know, I want more strength.
Okay, well, you have to take away dexterity or wisdom or whatever, and you get a sort of zero-sum to build your character if you add more to one.
And there's this feeling, I think, among some people.
That if you end up with, you know, heavier bones and stronger muscles and longer muscles and a bigger body mass and so on, that you've got to take away from something.
And of course the big fear is that the larger the body type or the larger the body size, then the smaller the intellectual capacity.
And that seems to be a fear that is focused mostly on the black community.
As you point out in the book, you know, when Jack Nicklaus sinks a great putt, nobody thinks that it's cost him some IQ points to do so.
But there is, I think, this general concern that there is a sort of hidden or subtle racism involved in praising blacks' physical abilities, because then in a sense you're subtracting, maybe even unconsciously, from their intellectual capacities.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, that's the teeter-totter theory, that one side is up, the other side is down.
I just don't think it really holds.
Again, one of the reasons that I wrote most of the book was to address the issue of why we're afraid to talk about it.
And to do that, I had to look at the historical discussion about sports.
And again, I refer us back to the end of the 1800s, the early 1900s, when mostly people of British and Scottish ancestry, Northern Europeans, I think it's a stereotype.
There is no real evidence to suggest that high intellectual ability doesn't correlate out with high success.
You can look in the National Football League, and football players are given something called the Wonder League test, which is really an IQ test.
And they do correlate that out with different positions.
So the highest intellect positions tend to be positions where you do a lot of play calling, and that's the quarterback and the center positions.
And what, 50% of the NFL now are African-American quarterbacks, and they still don't get the opportunities that they probably deserve.
So it clearly indicates that you can have a high intellect and run a complex offense at the level of the NFL where a playbook looks like the New York white pages.
And sorry, but I did actually, I can't remember the exact number, but I looked up the average IQ for the NBA.
Like, it's like college level and above.
I think the average, it was definitely above 115.
It was above a standard deviation, above the norm.
So, of course, the, you know, the blacks heavily dominate in the NBA. They are, of course, incredible physical specimens, as are all of the people in the NBA. And they're remarkably smart as well.
So, you know, that doesn't seem to be teeter-totter enabled.
Yeah, and when anyone brings up the idea that somehow black quarterbacks are not as smart as white quarterbacks, I just say Ryan Leaf, and they don't know what else to say at that point.
Well, and of course, any coach would be an idiot, right?
I mean, because coaches, and there's some great segments about this in your book, but the coaches want to win, and any coach who said, well, I'm not going to...
going to put any blacks out on the field because I'm racist, would be a coach for approximately 12 seconds because they want to win and they'll use whatever tools they can to win the most.
And they're gravitating towards the African-Americans because they really help contribute to the victories.
You pointed out, I was going to read off the numbers, but I wanted people to have a look at the book.
But the guy who was doing the analysis of race in baseball, the degree to which black success in baseball is pretty centered around racial characteristics.
It's pretty unarguable, and any coach that's going to reject that is going to reject victory and not be a coach for very long.
Yeah, I think one of my favorite moments in the book was I was at a sociology conference, a sociology of sports conference, and it ended up that the guy who wrote the introduction of my book was president of the American Society of Sports Sociologists,
and he happened to be an African-American from Wake Forest, and he wrote the introduction of my book because he believed in me, and he believed it wasn't a racist book, and it was actually empowering to blacks, But as part of our friendship, I went to speak and gave a number of presentations.
And I remember one where I was being challenged by a sociologist.
And remember, sports sociologists fall into this postmodernist view that there are no differences.
And they kind of reject all the hard science evidence that seems so obvious to physical anthropologists and geneticists.
And this guy was countering me and saying, There's selection going on on football teams that the reason there's no blacks at certain positions and there's mostly whites in other positions is purely because of this history of prejudice and coaches come in and they automatically screen people into one position or another and I see steam coming out of the ears of a black guy in the back of the room and suddenly he raises his hand and I call on him and he stands up and he says,
He's looked around like almost a disgust at this audience, which was 95% white.
And he says, I'm a coach.
I'm a black coach.
And I could tell you, I don't once, I'm never going to pick a player who's black or white based on my understanding of what I think the historical prejudice is against them.
All the positions that I pick are based on their ability, and the fact is that whites tend to dominate at the center position on my team, and blacks dominated the defensive back position on my team, and whites dominated guards, and blacks dominated tackles.
You may think that this is a prejudice and you may think that I've been corrupted by years of being, you know, at the bottom end of the racial scare.
But I'll tell you, I'm a coach and I'm going to be out on my derriere if I'm not picking the best players in every position.
I can tell you that every black coach and every white coach in America feels exactly the same way.
And there is no selection going on.
I mean, we might have said that 30 or 40 years ago, but that ended with a Texas Western victory in the NCAA in the late 1960s.
It just doesn't go on anymore.
You can't keep your job that way.
Yeah, I mean, I've often sort of thought that, not that it would ever happen, but if the KKK wanted to do a documentary and Morgan Freeman offered to narrate it for them, they'd be like, yes!
Because after March of the Penguins, he's like the best narrator for any kind of documentary you could think of.
Quality is quality, and it's always bothered me, fundamentally, because it seems so paternalistic to have this view That somehow black people will be offended by facts is such an insult to the integrity, intellectual capacity, and maturity of black people.
They're facts. We can argue about the facts.
We can argue about the interpretation.
Actually, we can't really argue about the facts.
We can argue about the interpretation.
We can argue the degree to which there are cultural influences or sociological or socioeconomic status influences.
But the facts are the facts.
And the idea that we have to shield blacks from facts, it just seems so ridiculous.
How paternalistic is that?
I mean, they're big people.
They're fine. They're mature.
They can handle facts and we can have an intelligent debate about this.
And it's also bothered me when people say, well, we need to have an honest discussion about race, but no facts can come into the discussion.
And it's like, well, how is that an honest discussion then?
I had 19 of the reviews of Taboo that I could figure out came from African Americans.
18 were positive, one was negative.
And as I said before, every time I gave a speech on this, invariably an African American would get up and shout down some liberal, and I hate to say the word liberal, I'm very politically liberal and socially accepting and socially liberal, but someone who portrayed themselves as a liberal defender of the blank slate theory and That there are no differences and that we are all being racist by engaging in discussion of this book called Taboo,
which was racist for even having been written, and we should therefore not read it, which was really the contention of a small but vocal minority who reviewed the book, that this should not have ever been written or allowed to have been written.
Well, and I just want to sort of close up by pointing out as you go into great lengths of the book, and it is instructive to realize the degree to which there was horrible racism against black athletes in the past.
You know, as you point out, in the 60s, it was NBA and NFL were dominated by whites.
And when, of course, blacks were allowed to enter in and compete, they have been incredibly successful.
But there was a lot of exclusion.
I know your story of the black boxer who married the white woman and how hostile people were to that, that there was, you know, to be sensitive.
And the history, of course, of this is long, complex and fraught with a huge amount of trauma and ugliness.
But there was huge, systematic, ugly, vicious, racist barriers against equal competition between the races in sports.
and that legacy, I think, has largely been dealt with.
You know, again, there's always improvements to make, but we should at least respect the progress that's been made in the last couple of generations.
But that has, of course, left its shadow, left its scars upon the emotional and sociological conversational landscape within America.
But so I really sort of wanted to point that out and then just ask if you what your comments are on looking, I guess, decade and a half anniversary of the book.
How you feel it's held up and what's the value in reading something so old for people, given so much time has passed, in an area where you could argue the most advances have been made in human knowledge in generations, which is around human genomes.
Well, the book is still in print, which is rare.
There aren't many books that have been out for 15 years that remain in print.
And the reason it's still in print is because the research has not advanced, eclipsed it, let's put it that way.
There's been more research and all of it's just reinforced the preliminary research that I think I reflected in the book.
And the book is actually more a cultural study than it is a science study.
It's looking at the history of how we've discussed the race issue, how science has used and misused the race concept.
And it uses sports as a metaphor to understand human differences.
So it's really a universal story that I think applies today.
And frankly, sports is fun.
And it provides an entree point, a shared entree point that blacks and Asians and whites readily understand.
To discuss prickly issues.
Human differences are real.
We're actually more aware of them now because of the universality of the media.
And we have to recognize how do we find a conversation about these things that doesn't ultimately demonize.
So it's really an icebreaker.
And I think it's going to remain part of the public conversation.
It's one of those weird books that doesn't need a sequel to it.
It holds up and it's fascinating and I think tells a tale that many of us can continue to learn from.
Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate the book.
We'll, of course, put a link to it below in order to allow people to get the book and read through it themselves.
It's a well-written book.
It's an easy read. You know, of course, liberals will need the paper bag of breathe into it every now and then.
When they get too anxious, they'll need hug pillows and puppy videos or something like that.
But it's well worth perusing, and I appreciate the addition that you've made to a challenging conversation.
Thanks, of course, so much for your time today.
It was a great pleasure to chat. Thank you.
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