Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It

Mr. Entine's "Taboo" is not trying to "prove" much of anything other than that the debate over human differences, which has rocked science for more than a hundred years, has been distorted by one ideological agenda after another. I am an anthropology professor and found his account of evolution and the history of "race science" superb and very nuanced. It takes no sides other than to challenge shallow thinking, particularly the academic wave of post-modernist thinkers that have corrupted academia and threaten to undermine genetic research into the human genome, which after all is focused on finding population differences.

"Taboo" does away with ideological posturing such as "the reality that most genetic variation in humans is within populations rather than between groups." Even an anthro 101 student could demolish the relevance of that factoid and the corollary claim that "race is biologically meaningless" because "humans are 99.8% the same.

The fact that 99.8 percent of the population shares the same genes does not "prove" or even necessarily suggest that there are no "racial" differences (although I prefer to use the term "population" or "cluster" instead of race, which carries a lot of racist folkloric baggage). The percentage of overall differences is a far less important issue than which genes are different. Even minute differences in DNA can have profound effects on how an animal or human looks and acts, while huge apparent variations between species may be almost insignificant in genetic terms.

As UCLA professor Jared Diamond noted in his Pulitzer Prize winning book "Gun, Germs, and Steel" (which Entine discusses in "Taboo"), if an alien were to arrive on our planet and analyse our DNA, humans would appear as a third race of chimpanzees. Although it is believed they took a different evolutionary path from humans five million years ago, chimps share fully 98.4 percent of our DNA. From a genetic perspective, human groups and chimpanzees are almost identical because their genes code for similar phenotypes, such as bone structure, which are remarkably similar in many animals. For that matter, dogs share about 95 percent of our genome and mice 90 percent, which is why these species make good laboratory animals. Even the tiny roundworm, barely visible to the naked eye, share about 74 percent of its genes with humans. There are billions of base pairs that make up the genes on the human genome. Each change in a base pair can alter a gene.

"Taboo" show clearly that the critical factor in genetics is how genes are patterned and what traits they influence. This inalterable but frequently overlooked fact undermines the simplistic assertion that racial mixing on the edges of population sets automatically renders all categories of "race" meaningless. Certainly, population genetics is not predictive of individual behavior but even with the built in fuzziness, it can help us realize patterns in such things as the proclivity to diseases -- and the ability to sprint fast (populations of West African ancestry), which Entine discusses at length, and eloquently, in "Taboo." As retired University of California molecular biologist Vincent Sarich has noted, there are no measurable genetic differences between a wild wolf, a Labrador, a pit pull and a cocker spaniel, but there are certainly biologically based functional differences between these within-species breeds.

Why, writes Entine, do we so readily accept that evolution has turned out blacks with a genetic proclivity to contract sickle cell and colo-rectal cancer, Jews of European heritage who are one hundred times more likely than other groups to fall victim to the degenerative neurological disease Tay-Sachs, Asians who are genetically more reaction to alcohol, and whites who are most vulnerable to cystic fibrosis and multiple sclerosis, yet find it racist to acknowledge that the success of East African distance runners, Eurasian white power lifters, and sprinters of West African ancestry can be explained, in part, by genetics?

The author convincingly deomonstrates that the "politically correct" default belief that culture and environment alone explains all human differences is ideological posturing, which ultimately feeds cynicism and bolsters Creationist essentialism.

Anyone who cares about rational dialogue on controversial yet critical issues will enjoy this book. I have incorporated it in my classes, as have many of my colleagues.