Pete suggests

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Guardianista perfection

Monday, 25th August 2008

A really quite exquisite example of the genre:

However, if it's OK to equate black dominance in sprinting to biological factors based on race, it also then paves the way for equating black underachievement in education, for example, to inherent racially orientated biological differences, such as smaller brains.

Eh?

Sorry my dear but the universe isn't here to confirm (or indeed deny) your prejudices.

There is evidence that those of West African descent are better at sprinting....actually, no that's not in fact true. Over just about every possible measure of performance by human beings the variations within group are greater than those between groups. We thus find West Africans who cannot beat me over 100 metres (a 45 year old smoker!) just as we find those like Usain Bolt (yes, of course, of West African descent, not origin). But the means or medians within groups can be different, meaning that the statistical outliers can be just that much better than those from other groups.

This is, in a way, an adaptation of the argument over the variance of male and female intelligences that got Larry Summers into such hot water at Harvard.

But leaving aside that more subtle argument about variance between and within groups, we do in fact have some observable facts about the world. Sprinting is indeed dominated by those of West African descent. But no, it's nothing to do with societal factors, for if it were, that running is a cheap sport to pursue, we'd expect similar domination of the longer distances. Which we do not in fact see, that is left to the East and North Africans, a group as genetically different as Caucasians are from either (there's more genetic variation within Africa than there is in the rest of the world put together).

Those are of course facts: the reason that it wouldn't be OK to then go on and talk about smaller brains or educational achievement is because there's absolutely no evidence to support such suppositions. For the well known fact that intelligence (whatever that actually is) is not correlated with brain size for a start.

To me however the most entertaining part of the piece is the way in which group identity gets in the way.

As she's actually written it, "blacks dominate" is entirely untrue. It's those of West African descent. But in the Guardianista universe, all who are not white, not from the socially dominant groups of the industrial countries, are "black". Thus we mustn't distinguish between different groups of "blacks". Which, when you're talking about things like genetic predisposition is insane. Just as with the sprinting/long distance divide between West and East, there's one for sickle cell anaemia, too.