Rhinocrisy

A completely Super-Bowl-unrelated conversation led me to this rather old Salon article by Gary Kamiya, titled “The black edge: Are athletes of African descent genetically superior?”

The article is a review of a book by one Jon Entine, titled “Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It”. Entine, while bowing low to acknowledge that training and opportunity and hundreds of other environmental and social factors contribute, argues that blacks essentially do have better genetics.

This may be true, but I think this is something of a fallacy. The key lies in the brief parenthetical given by Kamiya, “Africa has greater genetic variety than any other continent, which helps to explain why people of African descent can be genetically gifted.”

The above is a very well-established fact and is the product of the famous “Out of Africa” migration ca. 100,000 years ago, which forced a population bottleneck. The Out of Africa population had to undergo a dramatic contraction and expansion in population size, which has the effect of removing significant amounts of genetic diversity from the population. Subsequently other populations underwent additional bottlenecks - upon migrating into Europe or East Asia, for example. We can see the signature of these bottlenecks in the distribution of gene frequencies in these populations.

If we consider new and frequent alleles (that is, those that arose after our divergence from chimp and that show more than, say, 5% frequency in the population), which are more likely to be under positive selection than new rare alleles, then there will be almost no alleles present in Out of Africa populations that are not present in the African populations. Actually, this will be sharper for genes under selection, since selection should be weaker in bottleneck populations.

What this means is if we consider any particular trait that confers some freakish ability, we should expect to find Africans with that freakish ability. This will increase further if we consider multi-factoral traits, since it’s far more likely that we’ll find the coincidence of two alleles in an African population than we will in an Out of Africa one.

This has only one meaning: genetic diversity is VERY good for populations as a whole. This ought to apply to any sort of trait, not only athletic prowess, so really we should expect to see black luminaries dominating in all sorts of endeavors. So why don’t we? Well, obviously some things have stronger environmental components than others. It’s easy to pick up running. All you need are feet. Picking up the violin, on the other hand, is a tad different, and historical and social factors will obviously have much more weight there. But as that violin-playing field levels out, if genetics matters we should expect to see Africans dominating there.

As a final note, remember this: marry someone as genetically distant from you as possible. Can’t hurt.

This is a milestone of some sort, I suppose. Probably most blegs pass this marker long before now in their history. At any rate, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s read this bloog over the years, and the people who have sustained it by writing with me. I would be remiss if I didn’t single out Hedgehog, who has made this whole thing infinitely more enjoyable and without whom I would have long since given up on this project. So here’s to a few good years, with hope for many more.