WHERE THEORY STOPS & PC BEGINS

Dusty Baker Was Right! (Steve Sailer, July 13, 2003, VDARE.COM)

Dusty Baker, the (black) Chicago Cubs manager recently voted by players in a Sports Illustrated poll as the best manager in the game, said last week:

"[The heat] is a factor in Atlanta, it's a factor in Cincinnati, it's a factor in Philadelphia. We have to mix and match and try to keep guys fresh and try to have different lineups . . . I've got a pretty good idea [how it's done]. My teams usually play better in the second half than they do in the first half. I think that's because the way we spot guys and use everybody."

He then went on to violate all sorts of the rules of political correctness by opining:

"Personally, I like to play in the heat. It's easier for me. It's easier for most Latin guys and easier for most minority people. You don't find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, right? We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn't that history? Weren't we brought over because we could take the heat? Your skin color is more conducive to the heat than it is to the light-skinned people, right? You don't see brothers running around burnt and stuff, running around with white stuff on their ears and nose and stuff."

A huge controversy erupted. Numerous sportswriters and broadcasters demanded Baker's scalp: "Making dumb racial comments is inexcusable and has no place in society," said a columnist in Buffalo. On Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, when my friend Jon Entine, author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It, explained that Baker's comments were not scientifically implausible, Righteous Rightwinger Sean Hannity exploded: "Your science is a silly science, Jon. It's absolutely idiocy!"

It's never been clear how you can believe in Darwinism--adaptation to environment and natural selection--and then turn around and say that there are no significant biological differences among peoples from widely varying geographical regions. Either there's potential truth in what Mr. Baker said, or no truth in what Darwin said. It seems most likely that both are right to some degree or another.

MORE:
Dusty Baker Has Nature on His Side: Of course black athletes are more tolerant of heat. (JON ENTINE, July 15, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

Let's review Anthropology 101. Population groups have distinct body types. Elite football players, dependent on speed and jumping ability, are disproportionately of West African descent. Why? Because, as dozens of studies have shown, they have (on average) smaller and more efficient lungs, higher oxidative capacity, more fast-twitch muscle fibers, and a muscled but lean body type.

Note that sprinters of West African ancestry, including African-Americans, hold 494 of the top 500 100-meter times. Their genetically prescribed morphology and physiology is a disaster for endurance events--there are almost no elite endurance runners of West African ancestry--but a goldmine for sprinting and jumping. Allowing for individual variation, Snyder was intuitively right.

Mr. Baker's observations are common sense. Does anyone really think an Eskimo would perform as well in Wrigley Field in July as someone of African ancestry who has spent all but a speck of his evolutionary history along the equator? "The single most important factor in heat toleration is body proportions," says David Brown, a University of Hawaii anthropologist and morphology expert. "If the relative fitness levels are similar, those with more skin surface area to overall body mass--those with relatively longer limbs--are more heat efficient. It's easier to sweat, dissipate heat and keep core body temperature steady." Check that anthropology textbook: Africans have longer limbs and more skin surface area than whites, who have more than Asians. Stout-and-short Eskimos, who are of Asian ancestry, don't perform as efficiently in scorching weather as whites or blacks. Is it racist to acknowledge this?

Now, skin color alone is not the explanation for heat tolerance, as Mr. Baker implied. And Hispanics descended from Europeans are no more heat-tolerant than other whites. But those of African ancestry do have an advantage.

The only unknown is whether small differences translate into athletic advantages.

-Baker's not wrong to raise the subject: When Dusty Baker made his controversial remarks about race and heat, I understood his mistake right away, because of my fifth-grade science project. (Dave Krieger, July 15, 2003, Rocky Mountain News) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 15, 2003 10:11 AM