286 CHAPTER 12 | Modern Human Diversity: Race and Racism
Proponents of this view are Richard Herrnstein, a psychol-
ogist, and Charles Murray, a social scientist and former
fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative
U.S. think tank. Their argument, in a lengthy (and highly
publicized) book entitled The Bell Curve, is that the differ-
ence in IQ scores between Americans of African, Asian,
and European descent is primarily determined by genetic
factors and therefore immutable.
Herrnstein and Murray’s book has been criticized
on many grounds, including violation of basic rules of
statistics and their practice of utilizing studies, no mat-
ter how flawed, that appear to support their thesis while
ignoring or barely mentioning those that contradict it.
In addition, they are also wrong on purely theoretical
grounds. Because genes are inherited independently of
one another, whatever alleles that may be associated with
intelligence bear no relationship with the ones for skin
pigmentation or with any other aspect of human varia-
tion such as blood type.
Further, the expression of genes always occurs in an
environment. Among humans, culture shapes all aspects of
the environment. In the following Original Study, physical
anthropologist Jonathan Marks extends the discussion of
race and intelligence to stereotypes about athletic abilities
of different so-called races.higher than most Euramericans, many people took this as
proof of the intellectual superiority of “white” people. But
all the tests really showed was that, on the average, “whites”
outperformed “blacks” in the social situation of IQ test-
ing. The tests did not measure intelligence per se, but the
ability, conditioned by culture, of certain individuals to
respond appropriately to certain questions conceived by
Americans of European descent for comparable middle-
class “whites.” These tests frequently require knowledge of
“white” middle-class values and linguistic behavior.
For such reasons, intelligence tests continue to be the
subject of controversy. Many psychologists as well as an-
thropologists are convinced that they are of limited use,
because they are applicable only to particular cultural set-
tings. When researchers controlled for cultural and en-
vironmental factors, African and European Americans
tended to score equally well.^10
Nevertheless some researchers still insist that significant
differences in intelligence exist among human populations.
(^10) Sanday, P. R. (1975). On the causes of IQ differences between groups
and implications for social policy. In M. F. A. Montagu (Ed.), Race and IQ
(pp. 232–238). New York: Oxford.
Original Study
A Feckless Quest for the Basketball Gene
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 predomi-
nantly 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
post modern 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 televi-
sion 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 recogniz-
ing 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 con-
sistent 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 dif-
fer in complexion, language, and headshape. The first is genetic, the second
isn’t, and the third we simply don’t
understand.
What’s clear is that, developmen-
tally, 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 ques-
tion: 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 geneti-
cally unendowed at schoolwork because
“they” do so poorly.
In either case, we are faced with the
scientifically impossible task of draw-
ing 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