Do Africans make better runners?
A new paper tries to debunk hereditarian claims about African running success, but its arguments aren't convincing.
Written by Noah Carl.
You can see why people don’t want to believe that racial IQ gaps are genetic. They’re concerned the claim could be used to justify racism. But why do people refuse to believe that racial gaps in athletic performance are genetic? Athletic performance is much less morally loaded than IQ. Saying “he’s bad at sports” isn’t nearly as damning as saying “he’s not intelligent”. And the racial group that people are most concerned about protecting from racism, namely blacks, does well on athletic performance. It’s black overrepresentation in many sports that gets attention, not black underrepresentation.
One reason they refuse is that conceding genes contribute to racial gaps in athletic performance makes it more plausible they contribute to racial IQ gaps, and for many people that would be intolerable. As Greg Cochran observes, “if you admit that Kenyans have a different build than the Yoruba … then you’re admitting that regional selection can make people noticeably different”. Better to play it safe and insist everything is cultural.
Some recent books defending the position that there are no racial differences in athletic ability include: Superior by Angela Saini, Skin Deep by Gavin Evans, and How to Argue with a Racist by Adam Rutherford. Even Harvard professor Joe Henrich, who really should know better, told Richard Hanania, “If you grow up in Kenya, you might emphasize long distance running … That’s not because they get some special genes for long distance running”.
The latest effort to disprove racial differences in athletic ability is a paper by Tade Souaiaia and colleagues titled ‘Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running’. Specifically, these authors challenge the “racialist paradigm” that West Africans have an inherent advantage in sprinting and East Africans have an inherent advantage in long-distance running.
