Entine doesn't pursue this, but his theory could also explain why there might never be as high a percentage of black quarterbacks in the NFL as, say, black free safeties. Historically, the dearth of black quarterbacks was clearly due to the racist assumption that blacks lacked "the [intellectual] necessities," in the immortal words of baseball executive Al Campanis, to play the position.

As those idiotic assumptions fade, the percentage of black quarterbacks is certain to increase (a process that has already begun: Entine points out that the number of black QBs taken in the first round of the NFL draft this year equaled the number of black first-rounders in the draft's entire history). But the number of black quarterbacks might never reach that of halfbacks or defensive backs, simply because speed and strength, though advantageous and more sought after at the position now than before, don't confer as great an advantage as they do at other positions.

Case in point from the upcoming Super Bowl: The Rams' big, cannon-armed, slow-footed white quarterback, Kurt Warner, is a throwback to the Roman Gabriel era. He isn't half the athlete his black counterpart, the Titans' Steve McNair, is. But regardless of who is the better quarterback -- a question that has not yet been answered -- the point is that there will always be room in the NFL for quarterbacks like Warner (and, of course, like McNair), whereas there will never again be room for cornerbacks like the slow, can't-jump white guys of the '50s.

So why are blacks, as a group, better than whites or Asians at sports? The answer is simple: It's in their genes. "There is extensive and persuasive evidence that elite black athletes have a phenotypic advantage -- a distinctive skeletal system and musculature, metabolic structures, and other characteristics forged over tens of thousands of years of evolution," Entine writes. "Preliminary research suggests that different phenotypes are at least partially encoded in the genes -- conferring genotypic differences, which may result in an advantage in some sports."

So what are those phenotypic (i.e. observable) advantages?

His findings: "Blacks with a West African ancestry generally have: relatively less subcutaneous fat on arms and legs and proportionally more lean body and muscle mass, broader shoulders, larger quadriceps, and bigger, more developed musculature in general; smaller chest cavities; a higher center of gravity ... faster patellar tendon reflex; greater body density ... modest. but significantly higher, levels of plasma testosterone ... which is anabolic, theoretically contributing to greater muscle mass, lower fat, and the ability to perform at a higher level of intensity with quicker recovery; a higher percentage of fast-twitch muscles and more anaerobic enzymes, which can translate into more explosive energy."

With genetic research still in its infancy, of course, no one can assert with certainty that these phenotypic advantages are in fact encoded genetically -- the research hasn't been done yet. But Entine argues that with "dramatic advances in quantitative genetics," it's only a matter of time. (Africa has greater genetic variety than any other continent, which helps to explain why people of African descent can be genetically gifted.)

It might be objected that Entine's entire argument is conceptually flawed from the outset, because "race" itself is a meaningless concept. In a lucid discussion, Entine demolishes the voguish assertion that "there's no such thing as race," explaining that the argument over the word is little more than semantic. "Limiting the rhetorical use of folk categories such as race, an admirable goal, is not going to make the patterned biological variation on which they are based disappear," he argues.

Regardless of what we call them -- and he acknowledges that the concept of "race" is "fuzzy," fraught with popular misconceptions and mythologies -- there are different human populations that have in fact clustered and developed, through geographical separation, natural selection and perhaps catastrophic geological events, different heritable characteristics. A Nigerian and a Swede are not the same.

But aside from skin color, are there meaningful genetic differences between members of different racial groups? Left-wing critics like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, opposed to race-essentialist arguments, have argued that those differences pale compared to the things members of different races have in common. Racial differences between individuals are so small as to be genetically meaningless, Lewontin argues; skin color is only one marker of race -- along with other markers like fingerprints and resistance to malaria -- and it can be misleading. (In support of Lewontin's claim, Entine cites the example of the Lemba, a Bantu-speaking tribe in Africa; although their skin is black, they are genetically related to white Sephardic Jews.) In similar fashion, Gould has argued that "the differences between the races are small, just tiny compared to the variation within races."

Entine acknowledges that "Lewontin's finding that on average humans share 99.8 percent of genetic material and that any two individuals are apt to share considerably more than 90 percent of this shared genetic library is on target." But he argues that Lewontin, driven by an acknowledged "mission to reaffirm our common humanity," interpreted these facts in a tendentious fashion. The crucial point, Entine insists, is that "the percentage of differences is a far less important issue than which genes are different."

He points out that humans share 98.4 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, and that just "50 out of 100,000 genes that humans and chimps are thought to possess ... may account for all the cognitive differences between man and ape." The so-called regulatory genes, which make up only 1.4 percent of the total genes, can have a "huge impact on all aspects of our humanity." And those genes, he argues, are overwhelmingly likely, because of evolutionary logic, to be different in different populations.

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