ABSTRACT
This paper is a critical review of Taboo: Why Black Athletes
Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It by Jon Entine. It critically assesses the evidence that
blacks do in fact dominate sports and attempts to show that this is an
overgeneralization that perpetuates racist stereotypes. The tendency for both blacks and whites to
accept such views creates expectations and beliefs that channel efforts in
directions which reinforce historical stereotypes and limit opportunities for
blacks to a limited range of activities and careers. Commitment to equal opportunity requires that evidence for racial
differences in intellectual and athletic activities be subjected to a level of
special scrutiny that Entine has failed to meet.
Albert Mosley
Philosophy Department
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01060
Draft:
Please do not quote. All comments greatly appreciated
Racial Differences in Athletics: What’s Ethics Got To Do With It?
In his
book, TABOO: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid
to Talk About It. (NY: BBS Public
Affairs, 2000), Jon Entine presents what he considers to be incontrovertible evidence
for black superiority in athletics, and addresses our ambivalent reception of
this ‘fact’. The evidence derives from
facts produced in the laboratory and, most importantly, on the playing fields.[i]
Elite black athletes have a phenotypic edge over athletes of other races, Entine
argues, and this edge derives from genotypical differences between the races.[ii] While Asians comprise 57% of the world’s population, they “are virtually
invisible in the most democratic of world sports, running, soccer, and
basketball”.[iii] On the other hand, Africans, who comprise
only 12% of the world’s population, dominate running, soccer, and basketball.
Superior
athletic performance occurs most noticeably where the contribution of cultural
and socio-economic factors are least, Entine holds.[iv] This is why he focuses on sports based on
running. Presumably such sports offer performances that are least dependent on
extensive training and equipment. In
this, he follows the views of Amby Burfoot (a senior editor of Sports
Illustrated). Running, wrote Amby
Burfoot, “doesn’t require any special equipment, coaching, or facilities”.[v] Currently, “every men’s world record at
every commonly-run distance belongs to a runner of African descent.”[vi] Nonetheless, Entine warns us that this achievement is not proportionally
distributed throughout Africa: “West
Africa is the ancestral home of the world’s top sprinters and jumpers; North
Africa turns out top middle stance runners; and East Africa is the world
distance running capital.”[vii]
Entine
believes the refusal to recognize racial differences in athletic aptitude is a
derogation of our duty to seek truth. “Measured by fractions of a second, or
wins and losses, sport comes as close as we can get to an objective, racially
neutral scoring system.”[viii] In order to dispel the suspicion that
acknowledging racial differences is tantamount to endorsing racism, he presents
the views of numerous prominent black spokespersons that have also been led by
the evidence to acknowledge the superior ability of black athletes. Thus Arthur
Ashe, while militantly anti-racist, was forced to concede that, in terms of
athletic performance, “we blacks have something that gives us the edge.” [ix] Testimonials of this nature from black
athletes and intellectuals are cited by Entine as a way of showing that
acknowledging racial differences is not tantamount to accepting racist
explanations of those differences.
In
order to account for our fear of acknowledging black superiority in athletics,
Entine provides an overview of eugenic thinking in early and middle nineteenth
century, when prominent American intellectuals such as Charles Davenport,
Robert Bean, and many others advocated racist beliefs as a matter of public
policy. As a result of the work of Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, Robert Yerkes
and others, IQ tests were developed as a means of ranking human beings in terms
of their cognitive capacity. Using the evidence so provided, Henry Fairfield
Osborn, paleontologist at Columbia University and president of the Board of
Trustees of The American Museum of Natural History wrote: ”The standard of
intelligence of the average Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old
youth of the species Homo Sapiens.” [x] Even European immigrants from East and
Southern Europe were considered inferior races, and in 1924 Congress restricted
immigration from “biologically inferior areas”.[xi] Sterilization, miscegenation laws, and
segregation were some of the hygienic racial policies designed to limit the
transfer of bad genes. Such measures were considered necessary to ensure
progressive human evolution.
The
defeat of Nazi Germany brought about a repudiation of the ideological basis of
racist views. “Sports became a highly visible way to demonstrate to the world
that Americans took their government’s pronouncements on freedom and equality
to heart”, and universities were in the forefront of putting Negro athletes on
the field to compete on equal terms with the white athletes. [xii] Association with the racist ideology of
Nazism tainted the study of racial differences, and the very concept of races
differentiated by biological features was rejected in favor of the notion of
‘ethnic groups’, differentiated on the basis of cultural factors. It became
plausible that, if the Jews were not a separate race, perhaps Africans weren’t either.
On the
other hand, Entine argues that there is a biological basis for genuine racial
differences. He surveys polygenecist
and monogenecist explanations of the evolution of Homo sapiens, and opts for the view that the transformation to modern
Homo sapiens occurred in an already sub-divided population, “with one group
giving rise to the modern African and the other to all modern non-Africans.” [xiii]Entine
concludes that “the ancestors of a Nigerian, a Scandinavian, and a Chinese have
traveled significantly different evolutionary paths”, and that races are
reliable ways of classifying people in terms of the geographical area they or
their immediate ancestors derive from.
After
the defeat of the Axis powers, UNESCO of the United Nations issued a number of
studies showing that the concept of race had no biological validity. But Entine considers the UNESCO position on
race to be an example of “flawed science” and accuses it of having replaced
biological determinism with environmental determinism, in which all relevant
differences are acquired through experience. [xiv]
Despite attacks on the biological validity of racial concepts, Entine recounts
how eminent scientists such as Sir Ronald Fisher, Prof. Henry Garrett, and
Nobel Prize Laureates Herman Muller and William Shockley continued to hold that
blacks had less intellectual ability on the average than whites. In an article
published in Science in 1962, the
past president of the American Psychological Association and chair of the
anthropology department at Columbia University wrote: “No matter how low…an American white may be, his ancestors built
the civilizations of Europe, and no matter how high…a Negro may be, his
ancestors were (and his kinsmen still are) savages in an African jungle. Free
and general race-mixture of Negro-white groups in this country would inevitably
be not only dysgenic but socially disastrous.”[xv]
In 1969
Arthur Jensen argued in the Harvard
Educational Review that genetic factors rather than environmental ones
(e.g. socio-political status) were the primary causes of differences in average
IQ among the different races.[xvi] As recently as 1994, The Bell Curve argued that those who were least well off were so
because they had lower intellectual potential; while those who were best off
were so because they had, on the average, higher intellectual potential.[xvii]
From this perspective it is a short distance to the view that brains vary in
inverse proportion to brawn, and those with least intelligence depend most on
athletic performance and physical labor while those with most intelligence
dominate in intellectual performance and mental labor.[xviii] We are reinforced to believe that just as
the genetic makeup of Europeans predispose them to have higher IQs, the genetic
makeup of Africans and African Americans predispose them to greater manual
dexterity and athletic potential.
Of
course, attributions of higher and lower intelligence presupposes that we know
what we mean by intelligence, and Entine’s survey, to its credit, demonstrates
that this is not the case. Instead of
intelligence being, as Jensen held, a manifestation of a central processing
capacity labeled g, others have viewed it as a catchword for distinct types of
competence: analytic, creative, practical, emotional; linguistic, musical,
logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, and
naturalist. This might suggest the racialist argument that “each group is
intelligent in its own special way”, a view espoused by black intellectuals
such as W.E.B. Dubois and Leopold Senghor.
But it is equally susceptible to the racist rejoinder that some ‘modes
of intelligence’ are more important than others: on this view, the way Africans
think and act may have been valuable in the jungle, but they are dysfunctional
in the modern world, where bodily performance is routinely surpassed by that of
the machine. Entine recognizes that his
view might be interpreted as supporting this racist option, but disclaims that
“the data that conclusively links our ancestry to athletic skills have little
or anything to say about intelligence.”[xix] But I find his disavowal unconvincing: if
athletic skills can be conclusively linked to ancestry, why can’t intellectual
skills be as well? Conversely, if intellectual skills cannot be conclusively
linked to ancestry, how can we be so sure that athletic skills can?
Entine
reports the position of prominent social scientists such as Ashley Montagu and
Harry Edwards who argue that the concept of race has questionable biological
validity. They point out that average
differences between races are little different from the amount of variation
within races. Races, they argue, have a
political rather than biological utility, that of continuing a racist agenda. Citing alleged innate differences between
groups has historically been a principal justification for supporting existing
differences in the distribution wealth and power. On the other hand,
environmentalists typically stress the extent that black athletic achievement
is the result of intelligence, hard work, and the lack of opportunities in
other areas. The belief that members of certain groups are “naturally better”
athletes devalues the importance of training, access, early exposure, social
reinforcement and the like.[xx] By encouraging black youth to believe that
their natural domain is sports, their energies and talents are channeled away
from technical and academic areas. In this regard, Harry Edwards argues that
sports is a negative image that merely transfers the black male from the
cottonfields to the playing fields, and construes him as good for little
else. It is no excuse that many African
Americans have romanticized black athletes as realizing the natural potential
of the race.[xxi] Despite the myth of John Henry, we should
ask whether African Americans in the southern United States were better
cotton-pickers than their Scotch-Irish counterparts, and whether their progeny
ought to be proud of it?
But for
Entine, stereotypes that portray blacks as naturally better athletes are
distillations of commonly recognized truths.
And particular stereotypes such as ‘blacks can’t swim’ and ‘whites can’t
jump’ reflect genotypically based propensities of whites and blacks. Entine
dismisses the fact that swimming pools and training facilities are in short
supply in poor black neighborhoods in favor of ‘the fact’ that blacks have
denser skeletons and lower levels of body fat among elite athletes. And while the races may share most genes in
common, as environmentalists argue, what matters is not how many genes
differ but which genes. Just as different breeds of dogs have
distinctive personalities, behavioral tendencies, and afflictions, Entine
suggests that the same is true with different races of human beings: “canine
stereotypes are both reasonably accurate and critical information for
pet-shopping parents.” And he
concludes: “it is not far-fetched to assume we will soon locate alleles for
herding and guarding in dogs, as well as faster reflexes or more efficient
energy processing in humans.”[xxii]
While
Entine raises the question of “why it
even matters whether blacks are better athletes” he provides no discussion of
the question.[xxiii] Yet, why it matters is equally as important
as whether it is true. If it is true
that “Within the performance range in which most of us fall, the environment
may be critical.” then why shouldn’t most of us be concerned about what might
be done to improve the performance of most people.[xxiv] Instead, our attention is directed to the
few exceptional members of recognized groups, as if these exceptional individuals
were exemplars of the group. Entine consecrates the common mistake of taking
the most outstanding members of a group as ideal types representative of the
group, and this allows him to conclude that “when we talk about people such as
Einstein and Mozart - or Mark McGwire, Jim Brown, and Pele - genes count a
lot.”[xxv]
The
belief that black athletic ability is inversely proportionate to black
intellectual ability has been used to justify slavery, colonialism, and
segregation. And though Entine
acknowledges that biological determinism has been used to defend racist social
agendas, he does more to reinforce than challenge racist stereotypes of the
innate basis of athletic and intellectual performances. While acknowledging white dominance in
sports such as golf, rugby, swimming, gymnastics, wrestling, and tennis,
nonetheless Entine stresses the sports in which blacks dominate or in which
they are making new excursions, such as bobsledding. But even in sports involving running and jumping, it is debatable
whether the evidence so clearly indicates black superiority. He cites the
studies of David Hunter, which showed that, when adjusted for body fat, sprint
times between similar blacks and whites was statistically insignificant. But,
Entine objects, “Blacks have much less fat, a tiny physiological advantage that
can translate into a huge on-the-field advantage. This difference may be one
key variable that provides black males with an advantage in sprinting.” [xxvi]But
he does not tell us whether it is true that black people generally have less
body fat, or whether it is premier black athletes that have less body fat,
perhaps because of hard work and training.
Entine
glosses over such difficulties, and instead takes these ‘facts’ to show that
“sprinters are born, not made”, the same holding true of elite soccer and
basketball players. [xxvii]
It might be an exaggeration to suggest that, for Entine, Africans take to
running the way fish take to swimming.
Nonetheless, the conclusion he draws is no less an exaggeration: “Since
the first known study of differences between black and white athletes in 1928,
the data have been remarkably consistent: in most sports, African-descended
athletes have the capacity to do better with their raw skills than whites.” [xxviii]
This is
an outrageous overgeneralization. Do African and African descended athletes do
better in most sports? Or is it rather that they do best in sports based on
running and jumping? What about sports such as swimming, wrestling, gymnastics
and judo instead of running and jumping? Using these as the standard, we might
find that black athletes do not perform as well as whites. By choosing running and jumping as exemplary
of athletic activities, the deck is already stacked, and we are predisposed to
the conclusion that blacks are naturally better athletes than whites.
As a
matter of fact, in many sports blacks are not the superior athletes they are
made out to be. Whites continue to
dominate in hockey, skiing, bicycling, gymnastics, fencing, wrestling, as well
as Track and Field events such as the discus, the javelin, the shot put, and
the pole vault. As University of the Pacific sociologist John Phillips argues,
if we were to look at all the sports, and not just running and jumping ones, we
would see that blacks do not dominate, except in the high profile activities
central to spectator sports.[xxix]
While duly reporting this position, Entine makes no response to it. Instead, he
concludes that “the scientific evidence for black athletic superiority is
overwhelming”. His evidence is black dominance in running, jumping and boxing.
This may be an example of an innocent inductive fallacy but I would suggest
that it is more likely an example of uncritical stereotypical thinking
reflecting an institutionalized racist etiology.[xxx]
Entine
reports that, since 1996, a group comprising 1.8% of Kenya’s population has
produced 20% of the winners of major international distance running
events. And 90% of the top Kenyan
athletes come from a 60-mile radius around the town of Eldoret in the Nandi
Hills. [xxxi]
Entine recounts how, because the men of
the Nandi area of Kenya were notorious offenders of colonial authority, they
were channeled into athletic games as a way of co-opting their energies.[xxxii] But he does not address why this does not
remain a plausible explanation for the attention focused on athletic games in
the modern world? By diverting the energies of black youth to the least
productive areas of modern culture, more lucrative opportunities are reserved
for those who are not black. He quotes
Brooks Johnson: “The whole idea is to
convince black people that they’re superior in some areas - sports - and
therefore by definition must be inferior in other areas. It’s interesting that
white people always have the best talent in the areas that pay the best money.”
[xxxiii]
Entine
points out that “All of the thirty-two finalists in the last four Olympic men’s
100 meter races are of West African descent”.
But he offers no explanation as to why, if genes rather than training
are the crucial variable, no West African’s were among the finalists. And where
the finalists were African Americans, he gives no indication as to how he
established that they were primarily of West African rather than East African
or Central African descent. Entine never attempts to explain why West Africans
are not as good or better than African Americans at short distance running, or
why descendants of East Africans have not become dominant in the marathons. In
order to make his case, Entine is forced to ignore such subtleties.
Just as
measurements of skull shape (cephalic index) and brain size were taken as
indications of intellectual potential, Entine reports that anthropomorphic
measurements of body types and physiological reactions reveal the prerequisites
for superior athletic performance. Such observations have shown that sprinters
are muscular mesomorphic types capable of explosive energy, while marathon
runners are slender ectomorphic types capable of endurance over long distances.
Entine also cites empirical observations showing that black babies exhibit
superior coordination at an earlier age than white babies[xxxiv]
and that black teenagers have a “faster patellar tendon reflex time - the knee
jerk response - and an edge in reaction time over whites”. [xxxv] Facts such as these, Entine concludes,
derive from genetic predispositions that also explain the superior performance
of black athletes.
But
such facts have too often been shown to be artifacts of our social system,
reflecting how investigators think things ought to be more so than how things
are. The conclusion that Africans are
naturally better athletes is an unwarranted inductive generalization that
reinforces the view that the way things are is the way they are supposed to be. West Africans do not dominate in sprinting,
African Americans do. Africans and
African Americans do not dominate in all sports, only some.
The
‘facts’ Entine cites follow a long history of anthropomorphic measurements on
Africans, women, and the lower classes.
The Mismeasurement of Man by
Stephen Jay Gould and Myths of Gender
by Anne Fausto-Sterling are but two works that show the extent to which science
has not been an objective, value-free enterprise.[xxxvi] Instead, the historical record suggests that
the biological and social sciences have typically been more instrumental than
descriptive: “They do not carve nature at the joints but break it up at places
that reflect human needs - the need to control our environment in order to
secure food, fiber, health, amusement, and so forth.”[xxxvii] From a pragmatic perspective, ethics is the
attempt to secure the good life for ourselves and others, and the facts of
biology and human performance have been constructed to accomplish this, as well
as possible given the circumstances.
Entine
is best understood in the context of others who argue that current racial and
sexual disparities in social achievements [athletic and intellectual] are the
result of “natural” genetic predispositions.
The usual argument has been that European and Asian achievements
outstrip African achievements in the sciences and mathematics because Europeans
and Asians are naturally smarter than Africans, that is, have a higher IQ.
Entine has merely turned this argument around: African achievements outstrip
European and Asian achievements in athletics because they are naturally faster
and stronger, that is, have a higher proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers
and more efficient metabolic pathways.
But I
believe biological determinism of either stripe is misguided. For it
presupposes ideal types for existing groups, and encourages members of those
group to actively construct themselves on analogy with those ideals. Stereotypes of Africans have been justified
by reference to biblical texts, evolutionary theory, mental tests, and now by
measurements in laboratories and athletic contests. Allegedly unbiased scientists and contest judges are supposed to
base their pronouncements on fact rather than fantasy. Yet, one of the main contributions of the
new wave in the philosophy of science is in emphasizing the extent to which all
facts are theory-laden, and rest on tacitly held beliefs. In this light, facts
that purport to justify current distributions of opportunities and rewards
require special moral scrutiny.
For
Entine, the facts prove that Africans and people of African descent are
naturally better athletes than whites and Asians. If this were the case, then
it would seem to make sense for parents of African descent to encourage their
children to cultivate athletic skills, rather than intellectual and mathematical
skills. This line of argument has
appealed to many blacks, and even more whites.
It is a view that I believe is damaging. It promotes stereotypes that
have been developed to justify the exclusion of whole groups of people from
opportunities they are not considered naturally endowed for.
The
fact that such stereotypes might contain a grain of truth is no redeeming
feature. To analogize Entine’s argument, short people might be better at
entering small holes than people of normal height, and that is something short
people might learn to be proud of.
Indeed, those that consistently win ‘entering small holes’ contests
might be very good at it indeed. Short people might then be encouraged to
develop their abilities to compete in ‘entering small holes’ contests because
they are naturally better at it than most other people. This might be
documented by ‘objective measurements’, and provide for exciting entertainment,
but it is counterproductive to the expenditure of time and energy by people of
short stature. Other than as entertainment, skill at entering small holes is as
unlikely to improve the general social and economic status of short people as
running skills are likely to improve the general social and economic status of
black people. [xxxviii]
The
odds that a high school athlete will play at the professional level are about
10,000 to 1. Yet a recent survey estimated that 66% of African American males
between 13 and 18 believed they could become professional athletes, more than
double the number of similar white youth. And black parents were four times
more likely to believe it than white parents. Athletics is not even a good way
of getting a college education. While colleges gave away some $600 million in
athletic scholarships in 1997, $49.7 billion was available from other sources. [xxxix]
A commitment to social justice requires that
we appreciate the extent to which notions of biological determinism have been
used to limit opportunities for people of African descent, women, the poor, and
other socially marginalized groups. We need to better appreciate the extent to
which ideas are tools that can be used to help or hinder, rather than view them
as descriptions of how God or nature have designed things. Encouraging members
of a particular group to cultivate skills of limited utility precludes them
from the full range of opportunities available to the wider population. As such, I believe Entine has a special
moral obligation to show how his conclusions do not contribute more to maintaining
barriers of the past than to constructing a more open and just future.
Works Cited
Jon Entine, Taboo: Why Black Athletes
Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It. (NY: BBS Public Affairs, 2000)
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological
Theories of Women and Men (NY: Basic Books, 1985);
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (NY: W.W.
Norton, 1996)
Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, The Bell
Curve, (NY: Free Press, 1994)
John Hoberman, Darwin’s
Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Arthur Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic
Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review, 39 (Winter 1969) 1-123
Robert N. Proctor, Value Free Science? Purity and
Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)
Alexander Rosenberg, Instrumental
Biology, or the Disunity of Science (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994)
Rosenberg
Phillip Rushton, Race,
Evolution, and Behavior (New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers, 1995)
John Simon, “Improbable Dreams. African Americans are a
dominant presence in professional sports. Do blacks suffer as a result?” U.S.
News and World Report, 3/24/97
William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial
Research (Chicago: University Of
Illinois Press, 1994), pp.264-268
P.A. Vernon and A. R. Jensen, “Individual and Group
Differences in Intelligence and Speed of Information Processing,” Personality
and Individual Differences 5 (1984) 412-423
[i] Jon Entine, TABOO: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and
Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It.
(NY: BBS Public Affairs, 2000),
p.4
[ii] ibid, p.18
[iii] ibid, p.19
[iv] ibid, p.4.
Where differences of a hundredth or thousandth of a second make the difference
between winner and loser, “The decisive
variable is in our genes.”
[v]ibid, p.30
[vi] ibid, p.31
[vii] ibid, p.31
[viii] ibid,
p.79
[ix] ibid, p.80
[x] ibid, p.166
[xi] ibid, p.167
[xii] ibid,
p.209
[xiii] ibid,
p.92 This is a view he associates with Carleton Coon.
[xiv] “It
implied the mutability and perfectibility of humankind. The inexorable forces
of evolution and heredity receded into the background, to be replaced by a
moral dimension: it was now suggested that prehistoric humans had adapted to
austere climates through clever discoveries of fire, clothing, and artificial
shelters, not through chance, natural mutations, and the survival of the
fittest. Shadowed by the racist ideologies of fascism, common sense was
sacrificed to a new ideology: environmentalism.” ibid, p.215
[xv]ibid, p.217
[xvi] Arthur
Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard
Educational Review, 39 (Winter 1969) 1-123
[xvii] Richard
Herrnstein & Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, (NY: Free Press, 1994)
[xviii] Phillip
Rushton, in his book Race, Evolution, and
Behavior (New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers, 1995), puts it more
crudely: brain size varies inversely proportional to genital size. P.5, 162,
166-169, 231. Presumably, this makes
blacks better at genital sex.
[xix] Entine, op
cit, p.245
[xx] Carole Oglesby, quoted in Entine, op cit,
p.333.
[xxi] For a
critique of this tendency, see John Hoberman, Darwin’s Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved
the Myth of Race (NY: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997).
[xxii] Entine,
op cit, p.281
[xxiii] ibid,
p.6
[xxiv] ibid, p.8
[xxv] ibid, p.8
[xxvi] Entine,
p.252
[xxvii] ibid,
p.256: “It appears that for Blacks from west Africa, innate ability may be more
critical than training in turning out great leapers and sprinters.”
[xxviii] ibid,
p.268
[xxix] “If
blacks were dispersed across all sports their apparent superiority would
largely disappear.” ibid, p.273
[xxx] ibid,
p.341
[xxxi] Entine
dismisses the explanation that the town’s high elevation contributes to
increased lung capacity and metabolic efficiency because many communities at
similar elevations do not produce exceptional runners. ibid, p.47
[xxxii] ibid, p.49
[xxxiii] ibid,
p.77
[xxxiv] Who made
the measurements? What was the sample? Was it representative? Instead of
raising these questions, Entine accepts these claims as aspects of human nature
that are given to us as facts, and only need a proper explanation.
[xxxv] Ibid,
p.251 It is interesting that Entine fails to cite Arthur Jensen’s ‘evidence’
that, for complex stimuli, blacks
generally have slower reaction times than whites. See P.A. Vernon and A. R.
Jensen, “Individual and Group Differences in Intelligence and Speed of
Information Processing,” Personality and Individual Differences 5
(1984): 423 For an excellent review of such ‘evidence’, see William H. Tucker, The
Science and Politics of Racial Research (Chicago: University Of Illinois
Press, 1994), pp.264-268.
[xxxvi] Stephen
Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (NY: W.W. Norton, 1996); Anne
Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories of Women and Men
(NY: Basic Books, 1985); These works warn us that we ignore the social context
of scientific research at our peril. “Science does not always serve the
collective we or the generic man, but particular men often those
who control the means of production and application. Science is not different
from other aspects of culture in this sense.” Robert N. Proctor, Value Free
Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991) p.268
[xxxvii]
Alexander Rosenberg, Instrumental
Biology, or the Disunity of Science (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994)
Rosenberg argues that if biology is instrumental, so is psychology,
anthropology, and every other science that builds on it. pp.15-16
[xxxviii] From
the perspective Entine has provided, the fact that there are few small holes a
person of normal height is going to be interested in entering is irrelevant to
the fact documenting which group tends to win more such competitions.
[xxxix] John
Simon, “Improbable Dreams. African Americans are a dominant presence in
professional sports. Do blacks suffer as a result?” U.S. News and World Report,
3/24/97.
http://www.smith.edu/philosophy/Taboo55.html#_edn35
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