It's hard to regard Entine as having dubious motives for writing this book. He approaches the subject with neutral curiosity about the fascinating variety of the human race. But despite this, "Taboo" is certain to provoke cries of outrage in some quarters. Entine notes that he got a taste of that uproar when he worked with Tom Brokaw on an NBC documentary on this subject that aired in 1989 -- he quotes Brokaw as saying that a distinguished black friend "quietly withdrew our friendship for about two years" after the show. But he argues that "open debate" beats "backroom scuttlebutt" in combating the "virulent stereotypes" that continue to swirl around blacks and sports.

For some critics, who regard white America's interest in the subject as suspicious at best and blatantly racist at worst, such arguments may not be enough. "The obsession with the natural superiority of the black male athlete is an attempt to demean all of us," Entine quotes writer Ralph Wiley as thundering. New York Times sportswriter William Rhoden called interest in black athletic superiority "foolishness," an "obsession" and "an unabashed racial feeding frenzy" -- rhetoric exceeded by Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, who wrote that it was "a genteel way to say nigger."

For Entine, such reactions are understandable but out of date. There's no longer any serious dispute on this subject, he believes, and people who refuse to face facts will end up as ostriches, hiding their heads not just from outcomes they don't like but from science itself. (Entine takes several gratifying swings at postmodern academic fog machines, who in their scholastic zeal to make sure everything comes out racially rosy simply throw science overboard.)

Since at this point the science is not conclusive (although it tends to support Entine's thesis), the question may in the end come down to what one wants to believe. Is being prepared to believe that blacks as a group have a genetically based athletic advantage over other races a sign of racism? Or is it a sign of scientific enlightenment, a willingness to open oneself up to the truth, wherever it leads? There is also an instrumentalist question: Will merely raising this subject set back the course of racial enlightenment? What happens to the brotherhood of man if some brothers can run faster than others?

Old-school liberals, confronting a legacy of scientistic racism, tend to assume that those who believe that different human populations are fundamentally different in any meaningful way (aside from genetic markers like those for sickle-cell anemia and the like) are either racists or perverse positivists, wrongheadedly seeking to extend the dominion of hard science beyond its possible reach (to bolster retrograde assumptions, no doubt). This is essentially the argument Gould and his like-minded colleagues make against evolutionary psychologists and others who seek to find a Darwinian imprimatur for men behaving badly.

This assumption was valid once -- and in part it still is. Racists still cloak their bigotry beneath a lab coat. But, as Entine argues again and again in "Taboo," the mere fact that legitimate arguments may also have been advanced by racists, or that scientific facts may play into invidious stereotypes, is not sufficient reason to abandon those arguments or deny those facts. The mania against "essentialism," taken to its logical extreme, is nothing but an assault on the spirit of scientific inquiry itself.

Yes, some bigots will rejoice in Entine's book and try to resurrect the "mind that's weak, back that's strong" canard. And some weak-minded resentful people will find in it confirmation of their resentment and fear. But the days when those kind of simplistic, Manichaean, zero-sum appeals could take hold in the public mind are long over.

In fact, after an initial flurry, the notion that black athletic superiority is natural shouldn't change much of anything. When and if it is definitively established, it will simply label blacks as physically blessed, gifted by the extraordinarily rich variety of genes found in the "mother continent," Africa. It'll be a fascinating but minor human reality, a lucky roll of the evolutionary dice, only slightly more significant than the genetic fact that some Asians get cherry red in the face when they drink. The spectrum of human knowledge, of humanity itself, will be expanded. And that advance will be remembered when the idea that because blacks were fast they couldn't be smart has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

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