Taipei Times: In your book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We are Afraid to Talk About It, you address "human biodiversity" and "race and sports." What impact does this have for sports in Asia?
Jon Entine: Humans like to move around and fool around. As a result of this, we are truly diverse, biologically and culturally.
However, many of our differences fall into observable or biologically measurable patterns. This is evident in medical research which shows many "racial" patterns in the likelihood of specific diseases.
For example, whites are more likely to contract multiple sclerosis, a disease almost unheard of among Asians.
A condition called primaquine sensitivity is responsible for the intensity of the reaction to certain drugs among African, Mediterranean and Asian men. Another mutated gene accounts for the sensitivity of many East Asians to alcohol. These are all "racial" patterns of a kind.
Reams of genetic and anthropological studies definitively show that heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure, the distribution of muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency, lung capacity, and the ability to use energy more efficiently are not evenly distributed among populations.
"Very many in sports physiology would like to believe that it is training, the environment, what you eat that plays the most important role [in running]," states Bengt Saltin, director of the Copenhagen Muscle Research Center and one of the world's premier sports medical researchers.
"But based on the data, it is `in your genes' whether or not you are talented or whether you will become talented. The extent of the environment can always be discussed but it's less than 20, 25 percent."
Despite the clear ascension of the black athlete in so many sports, athletic performance is not reducible to traditional racial categories of black, white and Asian.
As a result of intermixing and waves of immigration over thousands of years, there are no so-called pure "races."
However, there are some group differences, a consequence of thousands of years of evolution in varying terrains. There is a great deal of overlap in body types throughout the world, but there are clear patterns grounded in genetics.
"Evolution has shaped body types and in part athletic possibilities," explains Arizona State University evolutionary biologist, Joseph Graves Jr., who is black.
"Genes play a major role in this. Don't expect an Eskimo to show up on an NBA court or a Watusi to win the world weightlifting championship.
Differences don't necessarily correlate with skin color, but rather with geography and climate."
Ancestry, not outdated notions of race, circumscribe athletic possibility in performance sports such as track and field, weightlifting, wrestling and swimming. For instance, athletes of West African ancestry (including almost all African-Americans and British blacks) tend to be mesomorphs -- they have defined, muscular physiques, with strong upper and lower bodies.
They have relatively more fast twitch muscle fibers, which provide quick energy, and smaller, more efficient lungs. As a result, they are generally lackluster endurance athletes but dominating jumpers and sprinters -- for example, holding 494 of the top 500 times in the 100m.
Eurasian whites [and] the world's top weight-lifters and wrestlers live in or trace their ancestry from a swath of Eurasia, from Bulgaria through upper Mongolia [and] dominate weightlifting and field events like the shot put because of naturally squatter physiques and more upper body strength -- a biogenetic edge.
RSS