A Feckless Quest for the Basketball Gene

April 8, 2000

A Feckless Quest for the Basketball Gene

By JONATHAN MARKS

ERKELEY, Calif. -- You know what they say about a little knowledge. Here's some: The greatest sprinters and basketball players are predominantly black. Here's some more: Nobel laureates in science are predominantly white.
What do we conclude? That blacks have natural running ability and whites have natural science ability? Or perhaps that blacks have natural running ability but whites don't have natural science ability, because that would be politically incorrect?
Or perhaps that we can draw no valid conclusions about the racial distribution of abilities on the basis of data like these.
That is what modern anthropology would say.
But it's not what a new book, "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It," says. It says that blacks dominate sports because of their genes and that we're afraid to talk about it on account of a cabal of high-ranking politically correct postmodern professors -- myself, I am flattered to observe, among them.
The book is a piece of good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism (those dang perfessers!) that plays to vulgar beliefs about group differences of the sort we recall from "The Bell Curve" six years ago. These are not however, issues that anthropologists are "afraid to talk about"; we talk about them a lot. The author, journalist and former television producer Jon Entine, simply doesn't like what we're saying. But to approach the subject with any degree of rigor, as anthropologists have been trying to do for nearly a century, requires recognizing that it consists of several related questions.
First, how can we infer a genetic basis for differences among people? The answer: Collect genetic data. There's no substitute. We could document consistent differences in physical features, acts and accomplishments until the Second Coming and be entirely wrong in thinking they're genetically based. A thousand Nigerian Ibos and a thousand Danes will consistently be found to differ in complexion, language and head shape. The first is genetic, the second isn't, and the third we simply don't understand.
What's clear is that, developmentally, the body is sufficiently plastic that subtle differences in the conditions of growth and life can affect it profoundly. Simple observation of difference is thus not a genetic argument.
Which brings us to the second question: How can we accept a genetic basis for athletic ability and reject it for intelligence? The answer: We can't. Both conclusions are based on the same standard of evidence. If we accept that blacks are genetically endowed jumpers because "they" jump so well, we are obliged to accept that they are genetically unendowed at schoolwork because "they" do so poorly.
In either case, we are faced with the scientifically impossible task of drawing conclusions from a mass of poorly controlled data. Controls are crucial in science: If every black schoolboy in America knows he's supposed to be good at basketball and bad at algebra, and we have no way to measure schoolboys outside the boundaries of such an expectation, how can we gauge their "natural" endowments? Lots of things go into the observation of excellence or failure, only one of which is genetic endowment.
But obviously humans differ. Thus, the last question: What's the relationship between patterns of human genetic variation and groups of people? The answer: It's complex.
All populations are heterogeneous and are built in some sense in opposition to other groups. Jew or Muslim, Hutu or Tutsi, Serb or Bosnian, Irish or English, Harvard or Yale -- one thing we're certain of is that the groups of most significance to us don't correspond to much in nature.
Consider, then, the category "black athlete" -- and let's limit ourselves to men here. It's broad enough to encompass Arthur Ashe, Mike Tyson and Kobe Bryant.
When you read about the body of the black male athlete, whose body do you imagine? Whatever physical gift these men share is not immediately apparent from looking at them.
Black men of highly diverse builds enter athletics and excel.
Far more don't excel. In other words, there is a lot more to being black and to being a prominent athlete than mere biology. If professional excellence or over-representation could be regarded as evidence for genetic superiority, there would be strong implications for Jewish comedy genes and Irish policeman genes.
Inferring a group's excellence from the achievements of some members hangs on a crucial asymmetry: To accomplish something means that you had the ability to do it, but the failure to do it doesn't mean you didn't have the ability. And the existing genetic data testify that known DNA variations do not respect the boundaries of human groups.
To be an elite athlete, or elite anybody, presumably does require some kind of genetic gift. But those gifts must be immensely diverse, distributed broadly across the people of the world -- at least to judge from the way that the erosion of social barriers consistently permits talent to manifest itself in different groups of people.
In an interview with The Philadelphia Daily News in February, Mr. Entine observed that Jews are overrepresented among critics of the views he espouses. But is that a significantly Jewish thing? Or is it simply a consequence of the fact that among any group of American intellectuals you'll find Jews overrepresented because they are a well-educated minority? There's certainly no shortage of non-Jews who find the ideas in "Taboo" to be demagogic quackery.
Of course, Jewish academics may sometimes be speaking as academics, not as Jews. Likewise black athletes may perform as athletes, not just as embodied blackness.
How easy it is to subvert Michael Jordan, the exceptional and extraordinary man, into merely the representative of the black athlete.
The problem with talking about the innate superiority of the black athlete is that it is make-believe genetics applied to naïvely conceptualized groups of people. It places a spotlight on imaginary natural differences that properly belongs on real social differences.
More important, it undermines the achievements of individuals as individuals. Whatever gifts we each have are far more likely, from what we know of genetics, to be unique individual constellations of genes than to be expressions of group endowments.
Jonathan Marks teaches biological anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is author of "Human Biodiversity."

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