The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (44 page)

    
Regardless of whether a child seems to be exceptional, mediocre, or even awful at any particular skill at a particular point in time, the potential exists for that person to develop into a high-achieving adult
.

San Jose State University’s Gregory Feist writes:

It is important to point out, just as is true of mathematical precocity and prodigiousness, early childhood talent in music by no means is a necessary or a sufficient condition for adult creative achievement. It is often the case that the musically most-accomplished adults do not begin to set themselves apart in any significant way until middle adolescence, and even here there are hundreds if not thousands of similarly talented musicians. It is also true that being a musical prodigy or even being precocious does not guarantee or even predict to a high degree adult creative achievement. (Feist, “The Evolved Fluid Specificity of Human Creative Talent,” p. 69.)

    
Because talent is a function of acquired skills rather than innate ability, adult achievement depends completely on long-term attitude and resources and process rather than any particular age-based talent quotient
.

   This does not, of course, mean that everything is within our control, as is discussed in
chapter 7
.

CHAPTER 6: CAN WHITE MEN JUMP?
ETHNICITY, GENES, CULTURE, AND SUCCESS

PRIMARY SOURCES

Entine, Jon.
Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It
. Public Affairs, 2000.

Noakes, Timothy David. “Improving Athletic Performance or Promoting Health Through Physical Activity.” World Congress on Medicine and Health, July 21–August 31, 2000.

CHAPTER NOTES

    
At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing
.

Olympic track and field results for Jamaican medalists:

Men’s 100-meter final: Usain Bolt (gold) 9.69 seconds

Men’s 200-meter final: Usain Bolt (gold) 19.30 seconds

Women’s 100-meter final: Shelly-Ann Fraser (gold) 10.78 seconds, Kerron Stewart (silver) 10.98 seconds, Sherone Simpson (silver) 10.98 seconds

Women’s 200-meter final: Veronica Campbell-Brown (gold) 21.74seconds, Kerron Stewart (bronze) 22.00 seconds

Women’s 400-meter final: Shericka Williams (silver) 49.69 seconds

Women’s 400-meter hurdles final: Melaine Walker (gold) 52.64 seconds

Men’s 4 × 100-meter relay: Nesta Carter, Michael Frater, Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell (gold) 37.10 seconds

Women’s 4 × 400-meter relay: Shericka Williams, Shereefa Lloyd, Rosemarie Whyte, Novelene Williams (bronze) 3 minutes 20.40 seconds

Total Jamaican medals: six gold, three silver, two bronze

JamaicaOlympicGlory.com
Web site.

    
“They brought their A game
”:
Phillips, “Jamaica Gold Rush Rolls On, US Woe in Sprint Relays.”

    
Within hours, geneticists and science journalists rushed in with reports of a “secret weapon
”:
Fest, “‘Actinen A,’ Jamaica’s secret weapon”; see also Olympics Diary, “Jamaicans built to beat the rest.”

    
“no clear relationship between the frequency of this variant in a population and its capacity to produce sprinting superstars
”:
MacArthur, “The Gene for Jamaican Sprinting Success? No, Not Really.”

    
This is the same question people asked about champion long-distance runners from Finland in the 1920s and about great Jewish basketball players from the ghettos of Philadelphia and New York in the 1930s. Today, we wonder how tiny South Korea turns out as many great female golfers as the United States—and how the Dominican Republic has become a factory for male baseball players
:
Bale,
Sports Geography
, pp. 60, 72.

   To be clear, “great Jewish basketball players” is not a joke. Jon Entine notes the success of Jewish players in the 1930s:

“The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background,” wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the
New York Daily News
and one of the premier sportswriters of the 1930s, “is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.” Writers opined that Jews had an advantage in basketball because short men have better balance and more foot speed. They were also thought to have sharper eyes, which of course cut against the stereotype that Jewish men were myopic and had to wear glasses. (Entine, “Jewish hoop dreams.”)

    
“sports geography” has developed over the years to help understand it
.

Some prominent sports geographers: John Bale, Joseph Maguire, Harold McConnell, Carl F. Ojala, Michael T. Gadwood, John F. Rooney, G. A. Wiggins, and P. T. Soule.

    
In his book
Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It
, journalist Jon Entine insists that today’s phenomenal black athletes—Jamaican sprinters, Kenyan marathoners, African-American basketball players, etc.—are propelled by “high performance genes” inherited from their West and East African ancestors
.

   Blacks descended from West Africans, Entine explains, are endowed with shorter trunks and smaller lungs, longer arms and legs, narrower hips, heavier bones, more muscle all around, less subcutaneous fat, a higher center of gravity, a higher bone density, and a much higher proportion of “fast-twitch” muscle fibers—all key ingredients for strength-based, short-burst aerobic sports.

Meanwhile, three thousand miles across the continent, Entine explains, the same evolutionary forces have bestowed
East
Africans with a very different set of “high performance genes.” This lucky breed has smaller physiques, narrow shoulders, lean legs, much less muscle mass, and a higher proportion of “slow-twitch” muscles, rendering them ideal endurance athletes: marathon runners, cyclists, swimmers, etc.:

Relative advantages in these physiological and biomechanical characteristics are a gold mine for athletes who compete in such anaerobic activities as football, basketball, and sprinting, sports in which West African blacks clearly excel … East Africa produces the world’s best aerobic athletes because of a variety of bio-physiological attributes. (Entine,
Taboo
, p. 269.)

    
“White athletes appear to have a physique between central West Africans and East Africans,” Entine writes
.
“They have more endurance but less explosive running and jumping ability than West Africans; they tend to be quicker than East Africans but have less endurance.”

   Physiologically, Entine tells us, they’re stuck somewhere in the middle, leaving them without particular advantages in either short-burst or endurance sports. (Entine,
Taboo
, p. 269.)

    
In his own book, Entine quotes geneticist Claude Bouchard
:
“The key point is that these biological characteristics
are not unique
to either West or East African blacks. These characteristics are seen in all populations, including whites.”

Bouchard continues: “However, based on the limited number of studies available, there seem to be more African Blacks with such characteristics than there are in other populations.” (Entine,
Taboo
, p. 261.)

Entine also quotes others making the same point: “An average advantage, yes, but that says nothing about any individual competitor,” says Lindsay Carter. “You’ve got to be very careful generalizing,” warns Michigan State’s Robert Malina. (Entine,
Taboo
.)

    
Entine also acknowledges that we haven’t in fact found the actual genes he’s alluding to
.
“These genes will likely be identified early in the [twenty-first century],” he predicts.

Still, he contends, these as-yet-unfound genes are critical. “All the hard work in the world will go for naught if the roulette wheel of genetics doesn’t land on your number.” (Entine,
Taboo
, p. 270.)

    
“It’s pointless for me to run on the pro circuit,” complained American 10,000-meter champion Mike Mykytok
:
Bloom, “Kenyan Runners in the U.S. Find Bitter Taste of Success.”

    
“The better a young man was at raiding [cattle]
”:
Manners, “Kenya’s running tribe.”

    
He wasn’t the most precocious or “natural” athlete
:
Bale, comment on The Sports Factor radio show, February 28, 1997.

    
“I used to run from the farm to school and back,” he recalled
:
Entine,
Taboo
,.

    
In the decades that followed, the long-standing but profitless Kalenjin running tradition became a well-oiled economic-athletic engine
.

Alexander Wolff writes on the Kenyan running “miracle”:

Salazar ticks off the ironic circumstances that seem to cast the U.S. as a Third World country in distance running: “As big as we are, we have fewer people to draw on. In Kenya there are probably a million schoolboys 10 to 17 years old who run 10 to 12 miles a day … The average Kenyan 18-year-old has run 15,000 to 18,000 more miles in his life than the average American—and a lot of that’s at altitude. They’re motivated because running is a way out. Plus they don’t have a lot of other sports for kids to be drawn into. Numbers are what this is all about. In Kenya there are maybe 100 runners who have hit 2:11 in the marathon—and in the U.S. maybe five …

With those figures, coaches in Kenya can train their athletes to the outer limits of endurance—up to 150 miles a week—without worrying that their pool of talent will be meaningfully depleted. Even if four out of every five runners break down, the fifth will convert that training into performance … (Wolff, “No Finish Line.”
)