This article appeared on Saturday in the National Post (Canada) and a
similar version appears in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.

Also, I'll be discussing this on Jim Rome's Rome is Burning show on ESPN on
Tuesday, 7pm eastern.

It's sad that demagogues such as Harry Edwards are willing to play politics
with an utterly benign issue.

-- 
Jon Entine
Miami University
6255 So. Clippinger Dr.
Cincinnati, Ohio 45243
(513) 527-4385 [FAX] 527-4386
http://www.jonentine.com

****

http://www.nationalpost.com/components/printstory/printstory.asp?id=F3E87B50
-A746-4ECA-8E4F-D9E9255866F1

National Post

Dusty Baker gets the Greek treatment
Jon Entine

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Is the ghost of Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder working its revenge? One might
think so considering the brouhaha touched off by Chicago Cubs manager Dusty
Baker's observation that "blacks and Latins take the heat better than most
whites."

Snyder, a bookie turned football commentator, stumbled into the world of
racial politics on Martin Luther King Day in 1998. He was downing scotch and
sodas at a D.C. bar when asked why blacks had risen to such prominence in
sports. Snyder opined that blacks could naturally "jump higher and run
faster" because of their "high thighs and big size." All hell broke loose.
The Boston Globe ran a cartoon featuring a hooded Klansman consoling Snyder
with the words, "I certainly didn't find you offensive." The NAACP called
for his scalp. A few days later CBS handed it over.

Is Baker -- was Snyder -- off base?

Let's review Anthropology 101. Population groups have somewhat distinct body
types. Elite football players, dependent on speed and jumping ability, are
disproportionately of west African descent. Why? Because, as dozens of
studies have shown, they have (on average) smaller, more efficient lungs,
higher oxidative capacity, more fast-twitch muscle fibers, and a muscled but
lean body type. Note that sprinters of west African ancestry, including
African-Americans, hold 494 of the top 500 100-meter times. Their
genetically prescribed morphology and physiology is a disaster for endurance
events -- there are almost no elite endurance runners of west African
descent -- but a goldmine for sprinting and jumping. Allowing for individual
variation (the existence of tree-toppers in women's basketball does not mean
that women are taller than men), snyder was intuitively right.

Baker's observations are also common sense: Those of African ancestry have
spent all but a speck of their evolutionary history in torrid climates.

"The single most important factor in heat toleration is body proportions,"
says David Brown, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, an expert
in morphology. "If the relative fitness levels are the same, those with more
skin surface area to overall body mass -- those with longer limbs relative
to their torsos -- are more heat efficient. It's easier to sweat, dissipate
heat and keep core body temperature steady."

Check that anthropology textbook: Africans have longer limbs and more skin
surface area than whites, who have more than Asians. Not surprisingly stout
and short Inuit Eskimos, who are of Asian ancestry, don't perform as
efficiently in scorching weather as whites or blacks. Is that racist to
acknowledge?

Now Baker did overstep himself. No, skin color alone is not the explanation
for heat tolerance, as he seemed to imply. And white latinos -- those
descended from Europeans -- are no more heat tolerant than other whites. But
those of African ancestry do have an advantage in heat.

The unanswered question is whether small but meaningful differences
translate into an athletic advantage. Environmental factors such as
nutrition, fitness and hydration are obviously critical. But at the elite
level, where athletes fine-tune these environmental variables, minute
genotypic differences can be decisive. Managers understand this better than
most. Dusty Baker may have been speculating but he was not being absurd or
racist.

Perhaps the most disturbing twist to this tempest in a teapot has been the
hysteria on the political front. "Liberals" have rebuked Baker -- most
notably University of California-Berkeley sociologist Harry Edwards, who
patronizingly said that Baker's comments were "unfortunate and not totally
informed," which itself was as unfortunate and ill-informed observation as
one could make.

Opportunists on the right have reacted no better. I recently had the
unfortunate experience of appearing on the FOX News right-left slugfest
Hannity and Colmes. Sean Hannity appeared delighted at Baker's apparent faux
pas because it gave him an opportunity to bash liberals for what he and some
conservatives see as a double standard -- blacks get free passes for
transgressions that often cost whites their jobs.

There is, of course, a double standard. Shortly before Snyder was
liquidated, Dallas Cowboy all-star Calvin Hill, a Yale University graduate,
remarked that, "on the plantation, a strong black man was mated with a
strong black woman. [Blacks] were simply bred for physical qualities." That
remark created no stir -- until repeated almost verbatim by Snyder.

Adding the ridiculous to the absurd, Hannity proclaimed that Baker should
apologize. To whom and for what? Hannity's desire to even the score with
liberals got the best of him. The solution for double standards and
political opportunism is not to compound them by sacrificing yet another
innocent to ideological correctness.

This controversy transcends sports. The era of the human genome is upon us.
Geneticists are studying population-based differences in the hopes of
devising medicines and cures -- for multiple sclerosis that afflicts
Northern European whites; diabetes, which disproportionately hits blacks;
alcoholism, which impacts Asians because of a mutated gene; or any of the 27
diseases that disproportionately target European Jews -- purely as a result
of their ancestry. We need a new lexicon that appreciates and even
celebrates human differences without playing the race card. In other words,
get off Dusty's back.

Jon Entine is scholar-in-residence at Miami University and author of Taboo:
Why Blacks Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It.

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