False Assumption Registry

No Racial Differences in Athletic Ability

False Assumption: Racial gaps in athletic performance such as West African dominance in sprinting and East African dominance in distance running stem from culture, stereotypes, or environment rather than genetics.

Summaries Written by FARAgent (AI) on February 16, 2026 · Pending Verification

For years, the respectable view in science writing and polite public debate was that racial gaps in sport were mostly social stories, not biological ones. The argument had real force. Race is a crude category, human variation overlaps heavily, and old claims about innate racial hierarchy were soaked in fraud and politics. So writers such as Angela Saini and Adam Rutherford urged readers to look first to culture, opportunity, selection effects, coaching, poverty, altitude, and the self-fulfilling power of stereotype. A reasonable person, watching Kenyan training camps, Jamaican school sprint culture, and the global spread of sport, could conclude that "race science" was the thing to distrust, not the environmental explanation.

That view hardened into a broader denial: if West Africans dominated sprinting and East Africans dominated distance running, the safe answer was that genes had little or nothing to do with it. Critics of genetic explanations pointed to African diversity, to successful athletes outside the usual populations, and to the fact that Caribbean champions were not a simple racial category at all. But the pattern did not go away. Research on ACTN3 and other performance-related traits accumulated, and studies of East African ethnic groups found population differences relevant to endurance, even within Kenya and Ethiopia. A substantial body of experts now rejects the old all-environment line, arguing that culture and training matter greatly but do not exhaust the story.

The dispute now sits in an awkward place. Few serious researchers claim that "race" by itself neatly explains athletic ability, and many still warn, with reason, that broad racial labels blur more than they reveal. At the same time, significant evidence challenges the once-common insistence that observed group differences in elite running are merely stereotype, environment, or chance. The current debate is less about whether biology matters at all than about how to describe population differences without sliding into bad categories or old propaganda. The earlier certainty, that there were no meaningful genetic differences behind these patterns, has become much harder to defend.

Status: A significant portion of experts think this assumption was false
People Involved
  • Angela Saini wrote the 2019 book Superior and used her platform as a science journalist to insist that racial gaps in sprinting and distance running came from culture and environment rather than any genetic differences between populations. She reviewed Gavin Evans’s Skin Deep in Nature, praising it for demolishing genetic explanations and dismissing such ideas as racist essentialism. Her work reached wide audiences through popular science writing and elite outlets, shaping how many readers understood athletic performance. The result was a steady reinforcement of the idea that noticing population-level patterns in sport was itself a form of prejudice. [1][2][4]
  • Gavin Evans authored Skin Deep and argued that West African dominance in sprinting and East African success in distance running stemmed primarily from social and economic factors even while grudgingly noting traits such as slow-twitch fibers and leg length. He presented the case as a good-faith effort to separate real science from pseudoscience. His book received favorable coverage and helped popularize the view that genetic accounts were overstated or tainted. The influence lingered in academic and media discussions for years afterward. [1][2][4]
  • Adam Rutherford wrote How to Argue with a Racist and maintained that genetic explanations for racial athletic gaps lacked solid evidence and reflected outdated thinking. As a prominent science communicator he reached broad audiences with the message that culture and stereotypes explained performance differences. His stance aligned with the broader academic consensus of the period and discouraged deeper inquiry into population genetics. The book became a reference point for those rejecting hereditarian interpretations. [1]
  • Joe Henrich a Harvard professor of evolutionary psychology claimed that Kenyan distance running success arose from a cultural emphasis on running rather than any special genes. He presented the argument as consistent with broader theories of cultural evolution. His academic position lent weight to the environmental explanation among scholars and students. The view spread through lectures and publications for more than a decade. [1]
  • Roger Bannister the British neurologist and former world-record miler stated that black sprinters possessed natural anatomical advantages. He voiced the observation in public settings during the 1970s and 1980s when such remarks still appeared in polite conversation. The comment earned him swift excommunication from elite circles once the cultural climate shifted. His early warning became an example cited by later critics of the consensus. [3]
▶ Supporting Quotes (31)
“Some recent books defending the position that there are no racial differences in athletic ability include: Superior by Angela Saini,”— Do Africans make better runners?
“Some recent books defending the position that there are no racial differences in athletic ability include: ... Skin Deep by Gavin Evans,”— Do Africans make better runners?
“Some recent books defending the position that there are no racial differences in athletic ability include: ... How to Argue with a Racist by Adam Rutherford.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“Even Harvard professor Joe Henrich, who really should know better, told Richard Hanania, “If you grow up in Kenya, you might emphasize long distance running … That’s not because they get some special genes for long distance running”.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“The latest effort to disprove racial differences in athletic ability is a paper by Tade Souaiaia and colleagues titled ‘Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running’.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“As Greg Cochran observes, “if you admit that Kenyans have a different build than the Yoruba … then you’re admitting that regional selection can make people noticeably different”.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“As Steve Sailer notes, a much simpler method is to look at the top 100 all-time performances in each event, and ask what are the ancestries of the athletes who achieved them.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“Several scientists I spoke with about the theory insisted that they would have no interest in investigating it because of the inevitably thorny issue of race involved. One of them told me that he actually has data on ethnic differences with respect to a particular physiological trait, but that he would never publish the data because of the potential controversy.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“Saini’s enthusiastic review reflects the belief that Skin Deep buttresses her book’s thesis, which is that there are no important biological differences among sub-groups of the human race, however defined, and that those who think such differences do or might exist are either saps or bigots.”— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“Evans’s “demolition” of the proposition that innate differences play a role in Kenyans’ running success is, in fact, a grudging acknowledgment that the idea is almost certainly true... Evans subsequently stipulates that his argument “doesn’t imply that genetics plays no role at the population level.””— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“after 70,000 years apart from one another, adapting to very different environments, Europeans and Africans may turn out to have (in Saini’s summary of Reich’s views) “more than superficial average differences,…possibly even cognitive and psychological ones.””— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“Saltin’s research, as summarized by Burfoot, showed these same forces operating at the cellular level as well. Compared to Swedish runners, for example, Kenyans’ quadriceps had “more blood-carrying capillaries surrounding the muscle fibers and more mitochondria within the fibers”— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“Trained as a neurologist, Bannister was excommunicated from polite society after stating this 30 years ago: As a scientist, rather than a sociologist, I am prepared to risk political incorrectness by drawing attention to the seemingly obvious but under-stressed fact that black sprinters, and black athletes in general, all seem to have certain natural anatomical advantages.”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“Bloom quotes University of Leicester’s Paul Campbell. From the Enlightenment all the way through to the present day, there has been a science around racial typology and the belief in meaningful difference along the lines of skin color. ... Citing no evidence but his gut, Campbell dismisses the fact that different body types have evolved in different types of the world as adaptions to regional geographical and climate conditions, calling this Science 101 fact a “myth”.”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“Bloom also quotes Hong Kong Baptist University sports sociologist Yannis Pitsiladis, who believes that the failure of Asian athletes to challenge West African domination of sprinting is all in their heads. Same too for East African athletes, among the most dismal 100-meter runners in the world.”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“you might think it’s no longer necessary to reassert that there is no genetic basis for what people think of as race.”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“In Skin Deep, the writer and media lecturer dissects the dubious pseudoscientific arguments still used to justify racism.”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of biological determinism The Mismeasure of Man was published in 1981 — almost 40 years ago”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“In 2009, at the ‘Preserving Western Civilization’ conference in Baltimore, Maryland, Harpending stated, bizarrely: “I’ve never seen anyone with a hobby in Africa.””— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“In the 1970s,evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontinfound that the amount of genetic variationwithinany human “race” is greater than the variationamongraces.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“We wroteRacism, Not Raceto explain and dispel these and many other myths about race, racism, and human variation.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“Beverly Daniel Tatum, a president emerita of Spelman College,describes racial thinkingas a type of ideological “smog”: We all breathe racial smog without noticing it.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“The first study was led by John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“It was led by Ilan Libedinsky, a geneticist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“in his new book Rebellion or Revolution?, Harold Cruse says that economic and political revolution is unfeasible for the Negro in America, and he calls instead for a cultural upheaval, but with the warning that the black writer does not necessarily achieve universality by denying his ethnic base and that his only hope is to escape from the decadent standards of European civilization and go it on his own.”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“Black Fire, an anthology edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, presents numerous examples of this quest to obliterate at last what W. E. B. DuBois called “the double consciousness” of the black man in America. Each poem and story, explicitly and self-consciously, makes it clear that its purpose is to define and glorify an attitude toward race that is all of a piece and all of a color.”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“What I find disheartening in the representative fiction, poetry, and drama of Black Fire is that the writers do just the opposite: for all their febrile rage, they are still playing off and defining themselves against the white world”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“A website has been created to document discrimination against and negative stereotyping of white athletes. It's titled appropriately: Caste Football (www.castefootball.us). Owned and operated by Don Wassall”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
“Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn’t 'the same as ours.'”— Liberal Creationism
“Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) proposed their influential deliberate-practice view of expert performance. ... Ericsson et al. (1993) concluded that “high levels of deliberate practice are necessary to attain expert level performance” and added, “Our theoretical framework can also provide a sufficient account [emphasis added] of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance. Our account does not depend on scarcity of innate ability (talent) . . .” (p. 392).”— Corrigendum: Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
“Brooke N. Macnamara1, David Z. Hambrick2, and Frederick L. Oswald3 ... We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.”— Corrigendum: Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
Organizations Involved

Nature magazine published Angela Saini’s review of Skin Deep which framed genetic explanations for racial differences in sports as pseudoscience that persisted despite having been purged from biology. The journal’s prestige helped embed the environmental narrative in scientific discourse. Editors allowed the piece to stand without significant counter-commentary at the time. The review was cited repeatedly in later discussions of race and athletics. [2][4]

The BBC ran articles during Olympic seasons quoting sociologists who attributed sprinting and distance-running divides to mental or social factors rather than genetics. The broadcaster presented these views as the balanced scientific position. Coverage reached millions of viewers and reinforced the idea that body-type differences were myths. The pattern repeated with each new Games. [3]

The Association of American Medical Colleges set numerical targets for underrepresented minorities in medical training and promoted racial preferences to achieve proportional representation in the physician workforce. The organization justified the policies by citing persistent demographic gaps in medicine. These targets influenced admissions across American medical schools for decades. The approach rested on the premise that observed differences were entirely environmental. [6]

The New York Times portrayed statements about average racial differences in intelligence or athletic genetics as lacking scientific basis and denounced them as unsupported claims. The paper shaped public understanding through its coverage of controversies involving figures such as James Watson. Its reporting helped enforce institutional rejection of genetic explanations. The stance influenced other major outlets. [11]

▶ Supporting Quotes (11)
“The review, which appeared in the July 2019 issue of Nature magazine, was written by Angela Saini... “Such claims for athletic prowess are lazy biological essentialism, heavily doped with racism.””— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“The latest tired iteration: the May BBC article “Black, white and shades of grey — what’s behind sprint’s race divide?”. Writer Ben Bloom asks the question now raised, almost as a ritual, at every summer Olympics: Why many elite sports have a racial divide?”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“Bloom quotes University of Leicester’s Paul Campbell.”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“From Nature: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“numerical targets for underrepresented minorities set by the Association of American Medical Colleges have consistently fallen short.”— Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019
“publishing companies are ready to piece together anthologies with titles like Black Voices, Dark Symphony, Black Fire, etc., to help one to discover its essence.”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“The GUARDIAN's Angela Saini”— The GUARDIAN's Angela Saini (Guess How She Got That Name!) vs. "Eugenics"…AKA Science | Articles
“football and other sports have allowed universities to add non-whites to their student bodies... big Division I-A program, which feed the NFL nearly all of its players.”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
“'Racist, vicious and unsupported by science,' said the Federation of American Scientists.”— Liberal Creationism
“'Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence,' declared the U.S. government’s supervisor of genetic research.”— Liberal Creationism
“The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied 'that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn’t a scientific leg to stand on.'”— Liberal Creationism
The Foundation

Believers in the environmental explanation built their case on several seemingly reasonable observations available at the time. Post-World War II anthropology had concluded that biological differences among human populations were modest and best ignored given the ugly history of eugenics. Lewontin’s 1970s finding that genetic variation within any race exceeded variation among races appeared to show that population categories carried little meaning for complex traits. Kenyan success looked plausibly explained by altitude training, cultural emphasis on running, and economic incentives that funneled talent into the sport. A thoughtful observer in the 1990s or early 2000s could therefore conclude that culture and environment told the whole story and that genetic accounts were unnecessary or tainted. [2][5]

Yet specific physiological data kept surfacing. Bengt Saltin tested Kenyan boys against Swedish elites and documented superior muscle capillaries and mitochondria that aligned with distance-running excellence. Studies of the ACTN3 R577X genotype showed a measurable association with elite sprint performance and all male Olympian power athletes in one sample carried at least one functional copy of the R allele. East African marathon dominance produced 3,343 of the top 5,049 all-time times from Kenya and Ethiopia alone, accompanied by documented traits such as slender legs and exceptional running economy. These patterns proved hard to square with purely cultural accounts. [13][14][15][1]

The deliberate-practice hypothesis offered another pillar. K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues studied violin students in 1993 and reported that cumulative deliberate practice hours neatly predicted performance levels with the best averaging more than 10,000 hours by age 20. The finding was extended to sports and seemed to show that expertise arose from effort alone without need for innate talent. Subsequent work by Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald produced a meta-analysis that found deliberate practice explained only 18 percent of variance in sports and less than 1 percent in professions. The original claim lost much of its force once the broader data were examined. [12]

▶ Supporting Quotes (27)
“They begin by referring to a 2005 paper which noted that, as of 2004, every male record holder in a running event had either West, East or North African ancestry. Souaiaia and colleagues point out that several of these records have since been broken by athletes without the relevant ancestry... But this is a rather arbitrary way to analyse the data... in the 100m, 97 of the top 100 times were achieved by men with West/South African ancestry.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“The first is “Caribbean enrichment”, the fact that Jamaica and some other Caribbean nations have achieved disproportionate success in sprinting... But this simply shows that genetics isn’t the only factor that matters... The thing the sceptics need to explain is why people with West/South African ancestry excel in sprinting regardless of whether they’re from the US, the UK or the Caribbean.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“The second piece of evidence is “African diversity”, the fact that some of the best African sprinters are not from West Africa. For example, the African 100m record is held by an athlete from Kenya. Yet this is unpersuasive, since the athlete in question, Ferdinand Omanyala, is ethnically Bantu... Kenya and South Africa have large Bantu populations.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“The third piece of evidence is “East Asian Success”, the fact that the Chinese 100m record is faster than the West African 100m record... When you look at the data systematically, China does not do particularly well in sprinting. Of the top 100 all-time performances in the 100m, only one was achieved by a man of East Asian ancestry, compared to 97 that were achieved by men of West/South African ancestry.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“The fourth piece of evidence is “morphological diversity”, the fact that elite sprinters are relatively diverse in terms of their biomechanics... Yet it remains true that sprinting is overwhelmingly dominated by athletes with West/South African ancestry. And rather than having one single trait or gene, these athletes likely have a combination of traits that give them an edge over their competitors.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“What she lauds as the essential unity of the human species, Reich describes as “an orthodoxy that the biological differences among human populations are so modest that they should in practice be ignored.” This consensus, forged by 20th-century anthropologists and geneticists, came to regard race as a pernicious concept”— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“No intellectually honest writer would say, “Some have speculated that Kenyans might have, on average, longer, thinner legs than other people,”... Scientists’ examinations have shown that, as a group, the Kalenjin have unusually long, slender legs.”— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“There is no debate on this — unless you are a post-modernist sociologist who believes that all human differences are ‘socially constructed’. ... Campbell frames the discussion in simplistic, binary terms: genetics vs. social factors. ... calling this Science 101 fact a “myth”.”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“The vast majority of human genetic variation is today understood to be individual — that is, people from different populations can easily be more similar, genetically, than people from the same population.”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“Some have speculated that Kenyans might have, on average, longer, thinner legs than other people, or differences in heart and muscle function.”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“Some European and North American natural scientists began to promotepseudoscientific effortsto prove races were real, distinct, and hierarchically arranged. By the 19th century, scientific racism had won the day.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“The notion and practice of classifying humans into races based on skin color and other physical traits started a few centuries ago. This idea likely evolved frommedieval European religious and folk ideasabout the importance of blood and inheritance.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“Take basketball, for example, where African American athletes make up around75 percent of professional NBA players.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“the groundless and harmful myththat “Asians are good at math.” [...] Modern genome-wide association studies [...] demonstrate that only a small fractionof the variation in cognitive performance across human populations can be explained by genes.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“Some researchers have attempted to find genetic differences among races that might explain these persistent disparities in health. But that line of reasoning begins with a false assumption: The idea that races are genetically coherent groups”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“The primary purpose has been to increase the number of blacks and Hispanics within the physician workforce as they were deemed to be “underrepresented in medicine.” To this day, the goal continues to be population parity or proportional representation.”— Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019
“The dominant view is that we evolved by changing our environment rather than ourselves; genetic evolution gave way to cultural evolution. For instance, we “adapt” to the cold by making clothes or having a fireplace in our home. Culture allowed us to inhabit a diverse range of circumstances, and it diversified us accordingly. Yes, we too have diversified — in shape, color and size — but those differences are trivial.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“Genetic evolution began to accelerate at a time when humans had already spread from the equator to the Arctic. The impetus for acceleration came from people adapting, not so much to new natural environments, as to an ever-wider range of cultural environments.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“In sum, the faster pace of cultural change made genetic change more necessary, not less so. The two modes of evolution complemented each other, with one spurring the other forward.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“Negro critics and polemicists are continually demanding that a literature arise to complement the new racial psychology, a literature with its own identity and standards that will break away from Western traditions of judgment and become a special expression of the black sensibility.”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“What of craft—the writer’s craft? Well, under terms of a new definition concerning the function of literature, a new concept of what craft is will also evolve. For example, do I not find the craft of Stevie Wonder more suitable than that of Jascha Heifetz?”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“a rigid stereotype has taken hold: of white inferiority to non-whites (with the exception of Asians) in athletics. This stereotype has created a kind of "caste system" in sports, with blacks on top, whites next, and Asians last.”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
“Professional sports have also been racially integrated, and they provide an important ideological prop for racial integration and multiculturalism throughout society.”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
“Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic.”— Liberal Creationism
“Twin and sibling studies, which can sort genetic from environmental factors, suggest more than half the variation in IQ scores is genetic... On average, Asian-American kids have bigger brains than white American kids, who in turn have bigger brains than black American kids... The new science of MRI finds at least a 40 percent correlation of brain size with IQ.”— Liberal Creationism
“In two studies, Ericsson et al. recruited musicians with different levels of accomplishment and asked them to estimate the amount of deliberate practice they had engaged in per week for each year of their musical careers. On average, cumulative amount of deliberate practice was much higher for the most-accomplished groups of musicians than for the less-accomplished groups. For example, at age 20, the average for the “best” violinists was more than 10,000 hr, whereas the averages were about 7,800 hr for the “good” violinists and about 4,600 hr for the least-accomplished group.”— Corrigendum: Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
“Ericsson (2007) reiterated this perspective when he claimed that “the distinctive characteristics of elite performers are adaptations to extended and intense practice activities that selectively activate dormant genes that all healthy children’s DNA contain[s]” (p. 4).”— Corrigendum: Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
How It Spread

The assumption spread through elite science media and popular writing that framed genetic inquiry as politically dangerous. Nature published reviews labeling research on population differences in sports and intelligence as persistent pseudoscience. Books such as Superior and Skin Deep reached general audiences and received favorable coverage that equated hereditarian explanations with racism. The pattern repeated in BBC Olympic coverage that quoted sociologists attributing performance gaps to mental or social causes. [2][3][4]

Academic language reinforced the taboo. Papers deployed terms such as “racialist paradigm” and “scientific racism” to describe genetic accounts of running differences. This rhetorical framing discouraged researchers from collecting or publishing ethnic physiological data. Social pressure inside universities and funding bodies added to the chill. The result was a noticeable gap between public discussion and the accumulating performance statistics. [1]

Media saturation played its part. Television networks, newspapers, and sports outlets highlighted black athletic stars while downplaying or ignoring counter-examples. The narrative of the natural black athlete became conventional wisdom in coverage of the NBA, NFL, and Olympics. At the same time high-school data showing white athletes outperforming black peers in certain metrics received little attention. The selective emphasis helped lock the environmental story in place. [10]

▶ Supporting Quotes (14)
“Souaiaia and colleagues complain that “attempts to locate "speed genes" have largely failed”. And while this is in part because scientists naively put too much faith in the candidate gene approach, it is also because of papers like the very one Souaiaia and colleagues wrote, which casually deploy terms like “racialist” and “scientific racism” in an effort to smear those who subscribe to genetic explanations for racial differences in athletic performance.”— Do Africans make better runners?
““Racist ‘science’ [is just] a way of rationalizing long-standing prejudices... A world “in thrall to far-right politics and ethnic nationalism demands vigilance,” the sort of vigilance animated by books like Skin Deep (and, implicitly, Superior)”— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“This debate is stale, and all too familiar. It returns every four years, as sociologists attempt to dismiss why African-descended athlete wins every running gold medal (and in most cases silver and bronze as well) from 100 meters to the marathon.”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“Race ‘science’ — that is, research that looks at the existence and scope of these differences — has to some extent been purged from biology.”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“But today’s political environment reminds us that the concept of deep, unassailable differences between population groups persists.”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“Many people seem to assume that Black players’ dominance in the sport must havea biological or genetic basis—a stereotype widely enforced inpopular booksand other media.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“These affirmative action programs were traditionally voluntary, created and implemented at the state or institutional level, limited to the premedical and medical school stages, and intended to be temporary.”— Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019
“The dominant view is that we evolved by changing our environment rather than ourselves; genetic evolution gave way to cultural evolution.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“Almost everywhere he turns, the Negro writer is exhorted to catch up with his musical counter-part, to prove that he can match the examples of cultural genius found in jazz. Short of this, the very least that is expected of him is that he be relevant to his people, true to his origins, and, in other words, not write like Henry James.”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“The GUARDIAN's Angela Saini”— The GUARDIAN's Angela Saini (Guess How She Got That Name!) vs. "Eugenics"…AKA Science | Articles
“Every newspaper in the country devotes a large section to daily sporting events. Every local television newscast devotes a sizable chunk of valuable airtime to sports coverage. There are entire TV networks devoted wholly to sports: ESPN, ESPN 2...”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
“they have changed the rules to favor things that blacks do well”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
““Racist, vicious and unsupported by science,” said the Federation of American Scientists. “Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence,” declared the U.S. government’s supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied “that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn’t a scientific leg to stand on.””— Liberal Creationism
“A Google Scholar search in April 2014 showed that the article by Ericsson et al. (1993) has been cited more than 4,200 times ... and their research has been discussed in a number of popular books, including Gladwell’s (2008) Outliers, Levitt and Dubner’s (2009) Super”— Corrigendum: Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
Resulting Policies

Colonial Virginia enacted race-based laws that distinguished legal rights for indentured Europeans from those for enslaved Africans and by 1691 prohibited interracial marriage to prevent mixing. These statutes rested on the belief that group differences were fixed and socially consequential. Later generations inherited the habit of sorting populations by ancestry even after the underlying justification changed. The early legal architecture influenced how racial categories were discussed for centuries. [5]

American medical schools adopted mandatory diversity, inclusion, and equity programs across all stages of training to increase Black and Hispanic representation. The Association of American Medical Colleges set numerical targets justified by the assumption that demographic disparities were entirely environmental. These policies remained in force despite repeated shortfalls in qualified applicant pools. Legal challenges eventually questioned the approach but the framework endured for decades. [6]

Colleges lowered academic standards and bypassed standardized tests for black athletes while recruiters systematically overlooked white high-school stars with superior statistics. The practice created informal racial quotas in football positions and scholarship allocations. The policy flowed from the belief that sports success proved broader equality and that any deviation required correction. The result was documented discrimination against white athletes at the collegiate level. [10]

▶ Supporting Quotes (4)
“Settlers also began to passrace-based lawsthat upheld ideas of white supremacy, such as giving indentured Europeans legal rights that were not extended to enslaved Africans. By 1691, sex and marriage between Europeans and Africans was legally prohibited as a way toprevent racial mixing.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“In response, programs under the appellation of diversity, inclusion, and equity have recently been created to increase the number of blacks and Hispanics as medical school students, internal medicine trainees, cardiovascular disease trainees, and cardiovascular disease faculty. These new diversity programs are mandatory, created and implemented at the national level, imposed throughout all stages of academic medicine and cardiology, and intended to be permanent.”— Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019
“the colleges aggressively recruit black players and ignore white ones. No amount of success by a white running back in high school will get him a scholarship offer to play at a big Division I-A program”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
“all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.”— Liberal Creationism
Harm Caused

Scientists grew reluctant to investigate or publish data on ethnic physiological differences once the topic became entangled with race controversy. Research on traits such as muscle-fiber composition or running economy slowed despite clear performance patterns. The gap in knowledge persisted for years and left coaches and sports scientists working with incomplete information. [1][2]

White athletes lost scholarships and professional opportunities despite dominating certain high-school competitions. Programs prioritized black recruits to feed talent pipelines into the NFL and NBA. The pattern reinforced a cultural story of inferiority that affected youth sports participation and coaching decisions. [10]

James Watson was forced into retirement and faced professional ostracism after stating observed average differences in intelligence between populations. The episode sent a clear signal through the scientific community that certain empirical claims carried career-ending risks. Discussion of related genetic questions became more cautious even among those who privately doubted the environmental consensus. [11]

▶ Supporting Quotes (11)
“Several scientists I spoke with about the theory insisted that they would have no interest in investigating it because of the inevitably thorny issue of race involved. One of them told me that he actually has data on ethnic differences with respect to a particular physiological trait, but that he would never publish the data because of the potential controversy.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“Saini inadvertently affirms one of Superior’s targets, blogger Steve Sailer, who says that the definition of racism has expanded to include the “high crime of Noticing Things.””— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“In an era when science literacy is at global lows let’s engage this issue yet again.”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“Over time, the notion that groups could be divided and ranked based on natural and God-given traits evolved into a justification for slavery, colonization, and thedisplacement and genocideof Native Americans. European settlers largely ignored the sovereignty of Native American tribes, includingtheir land rights.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“Despite these efforts, numerical targets for underrepresented minorities set by the Association of American Medical Colleges have consistently fallen short.”— Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019
“The rate of genetic change may have actually peaked later than the above dates of 8,000 and 5,250 years ago. As that rate increases, so does the difficulty of distinguishing between adaptive and non-adaptive genetic changes.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“It uses data from a limited number of present-day human groups. Thus, as you go forward from the time of early humans, you capture less and less evolutionary change within the entire human species.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“Faced with these imperatives—imperatives it would take egomaniacal strength to ignore—the Negro writer is caught in an agonizing cultural dilemma.”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“the catalogue of sweet contrivance in this anthology is a long one, and it suffocates any feelings one has about the conditions that have produced this histrionic sloganeering.”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“white players who were told flat-out they were the wrong race to play a position in college”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
“James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn’t “the same as ours.””— Liberal Creationism
Downfall

Analysis of the top 100 all-time 100-meter performances revealed that 97 belonged to men of West or South African ancestry despite that group comprising a tiny fraction of the world population. East African marathon records showed 3,343 of the top 5,049 times coming from Kenya or Ethiopia accompanied by measurable traits such as slender builds and superior running economy. These statistics proved difficult to reconcile with purely cultural or altitude-based explanations. [1]

Empirical studies of Kalenjin runners documented specific physiological advantages while ancient DNA analysis revealed non-random patterns of population differentiation. David Reich’s work on human genetic history illustrated that after 70,000 years of separation Europeans and Africans had accumulated differences that extended beyond superficial traits. The accumulating data began to erode the post-war anthropological consensus. [2]

John Hawks’s 2007 study using HapMap data demonstrated that genetic evolution had accelerated more than a hundredfold after cultural shifts such as the advent of farming. Ilan Libedinsky’s 2023 analysis of a larger genomic dataset confirmed recent rapid evolution in traits including mental function and nutrient processing. The new findings contradicted the long-held view that culture had replaced genetic adaptation in humans. [7]

Macnamara and colleagues’ 2014 meta-analysis examined all major domains of expertise and found that deliberate practice explained only 18 percent of variance in sports and less than 1 percent in professions. A 2018 corrigendum using an improved statistical method left the overall conclusion intact with 86 percent of performance variance still unexplained. The deliberate-practice account that had supported purely environmental explanations lost its empirical foundation. [12]

▶ Supporting Quotes (16)
“Sailer finds that in the 100m, 97 of the top 100 times were achieved by men with West/South African ancestry. And in the marathon, 96 of the top 100 times were achieved by men with East African ancestry.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“Of the top 5,049 men’s marathon times, 3,343 are held by athletes from just two countries, Kenya and Ethiopia... Studies of East African runners themselves have documented that they have unusually narrow legs, high calf insertions and long Achilles tendons... “East African runners appear to have a very high level of [running economy] most likely associated, at least partly, with anthropometric characteristics”— Do Africans make better runners?
““In the early twentieth century,” Adam Rutherford notes, “Finnish people utterly dominated long-distance running”. ... If the “psychocultural hypothesis” were right, Finns should have continued to dominate long-distance running... Likewise, the stereotype of Aryan racial superiority didn’t stop the black American athlete Jesse Owens from winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.”— Do Africans make better runners?
“Reich's widely discussed book... describes as “an orthodoxy that the biological differences among human populations are so modest that they should in practice be ignored.””— Liberty, Equality, Reality
“Black people comprise about 18% of the global population, but every running world record at every distance from 100 meters to the marathon is held by an athlete of African descent. ... Approximately 7.43% of the world’s population is of sub-Saharan African ancestry. Using those population numbers, you would expect that those of West African ancestry should hold about 26 or the top 350 times for the 100 meters. instead, they hold 99.7333% of these fastest times. The likelihood of that happening by chance alone is in the vigintillions (1 with 63 zeros). ... Dozens of studies since 2008 have confirmed the impact of”— Race and the Olympics: 'Yes', Blacks will sweep the running events, and 'yes', genetics is the reason (and Eurasian whites will dominate field events and weight lifting)
“Okay, here are the current Kenyan Olympic medal totals, 1964-2016, by distance of running race:”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“Here’s Eliud Kipchoge, Kenya’s 2016 marathon gold medalist. He is 5′-5″ and 123 pounds. In contrast, Jamaica’s 2016 100m gold medalist, Usain Bolt, is 6′-5″ and 207 pounds.”— Saini: Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition
“But genetic research over the past 50 years has shown that human variation does not equal racial difference. [...] Researchers have shownthe variation between two Africans is on average greater than the variation between an African and a European or Asian person. There are no subgroups withinHomo sapiensthat have been reproductively isolated long enough to develop anything close to separate races.”— Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
“Failures have largely been attributable to the limited qualified applicant pool and legal challenges to the use of race and ethnicity in admissions to institutions of higher education.”— Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019
“Changes to the genome accelerated more than a hundredfold when hunting and gathering gave way to farming and other cultural changes (sedentary living, growth of towns and cities, rise of social complexity). And the faster pace of genetic evolution lasted well into the time of recorded history, reaching a peak of 8,000 years ago in Africa and 5,250 years ago in Europe.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“Human evolution went through two periods of rapid change. The first one was between 2.4 million and 280,000 years ago, with a peak around 1.1 million years ago. The second period was between 280,000 and 1,700 years ago, with a peak around 55,000 years ago. The second period saw rapid evolutionary change in three domains. In order of importance, they were: vision; mental function; and nutrient absorption, digestion and storage.”— Human evolution didn't slow down. It accelerated
“for all their febrile rage, they are still playing off and defining themselves against the white world, or, rather, their concept of that world. Loathing the stereotypes of the past, they nevertheless affect a schematic pose every bit as false as any Sambo conjured up in the Hollywood mind”— The Black Arts | Jack Richardson
“in high school football, all-white or predominantly white suburban and rural teams regularly defeat their all-black and predominantly black urban opponents... When the kids are timed and tested on their physical performance and attributes, the results are usually about the same.”— The Racial Caste System in Sports
“Tests do show an IQ deficit... whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Saharan Africans 70... Twin and sibling studies... suggest more than half the variation in IQ scores is genetic... MRI finds at least a 40 percent correlation of brain size with IQ.”— Liberal Creationism
“To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis covering all major domains in which deliberate practice has been investigated. We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.”— Corrigendum: Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
“There was no practical effect on the results when we reanalyzed our findings using Cheung and Chan’s approach, and the changes had no impact whatsoever on the substance of our findings and conclusions.”— Corrigendum: Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
Sources
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ID: FA-20260216-b2eb1e7f · Created: 2026-02-16T05:15:13.196237 · Schema v3

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