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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
As Cavalli-Sforza has so brilliantly demonstrated, trait variations are the result of waves and crosscurrents of migrations that at times -- frequently even -- belie the folkloric racial categories. This is true, of course, even in sports. Pygmies, who certainly have black skin, are not particularly good athletes. It's no surprise that their genetic history distinguishes them quite dramatically from much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africans. Similarly, the Lemba tribe of southern Africa was recently shown to be genetically linked through the Y chromosome to the Jewish population of Mesopotamia some 2,000 years ago. In key genetic ways, they are quite distant from many other Africans.
With these many exceptions in mind, it remains largely true that some body type and physiological patterns show up in various mega-populations such as West Africans, Eurasian whites, East Africans and East Asians. Today, no credible scientist disputes that evolution, along with local social conditions, has helped shape Kenyan distance runners, white power lifters, with their enormous upper-body strength, and athletes of West African ancestry who are explosive runners and jumpers.
What have scientists documented? Whites of Eurasian ancestry, who have, on average, more natural upper-body strength, predictably dominate weightlifting, field events such as the shot put and hammer (whites hold 46 of the top 50 throws) and the offensive line in football. Where flexibility is key, East Asians shine, such as in diving and some skating and gymnastic events -- hence the term "Chinese splits." Just watch the Olympics and you will see: There are no prominent Chinese sprinters, no runners of any note until you get to the longest distances and no jumpers, but the Chinese flourish in diving and gymnastics. Is this totally a product of cultural factors? It's extremely doubtful.
Despite this remarkable confluence of massive on-the-field empirical evidence and overwhelming heritable anthropometric and physiological characteristics, some sociologists and a coterie of ideological evolutionary biologists seem determined to distort this fascinating phenomenon by turning it into a racial issue. Some argue that the empirical and scientific data should be ignored in favor of a personal conviction that humans are a tabula rasa, a blank slate for society and environment to write upon.
In light of recent advances in genetics and the science of human performance, such extremist beliefs appear quaint, dangerous and even racist. Indeed, populationwide differences are widely acknowledged in disease research. Many populations of sub-Saharan African ancestry are genetically predisposed to contracting colorectal cancer, Eurasian whites are genetically prone to multiple sclerosis -- and East Asians by and large are victims of neither.
Why do we so readily accept that evolution has turned out blacks with a genetic proclivity to contract sickle cell, Jews of European heritage who are 100 times more likely than other groups to fall victim to the degenerative mental disease Tay-Sachs and whites who are most vulnerable to cystic fibrosis, yet find it racist to acknowledge that blacks of West African ancestry have evolved into the world's best sprinters and jumpers and East Asians into the best divers?
Yet that's the typical position staked out by ideologues such as University of North Carolina at Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks. Marks rails against even discussing the issue of human differences on the basis of his disingenuous assertion that the dramatic patterns of athletic success by athletes of different ancestral origins cannot be proved, in a laboratory, to be linked to specific genes. "If no scientific experiments are possible, then what are we to conclude?" he writes. "That discussing innate abilities is the scientific equivalent of discussing properties of angels," is "outside the domain of modern scientific inquiry" and therefore should not be pursued.
What a breathtakingly simplistic -- and indeed racist -- claim, that we should not even discuss the science of sports. Such a stand enrages many geneticists engaged in lifesaving research. "I believe that we need to look at the causes of differences in athletic performance between races as legitimately as we do when we study differences in diseases between the various races," declares Claude Bouchard, a leading geneticist studying obesity and athletic performance and director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. "In human biology ... it is important to understand if age, gender, race, and other population characteristics contribute to the phenotype variation," he writes in the American Journal of Human Biology. "Only by confronting these enormous issues head-on, and not by circumventing them in the guise of political correctness, do we stand a chance to evaluate the discriminating agendas and devise appropriate interventions."
