Are Africans naturally superior?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): We're seeing it now at the World Athletic Championships in Athens, where over half the winners are black though people of African descent are only 10 percent of the world's population.

We've seen it for years in the black domination of professional sports from boxing to basketball. And we're starting to see it not just in the physical domain, but the intellectual as well.

In the United States, home to one of the biggest black populations outside Africa, it is customary to lament the poor academic achievement of African-Americans. Liberals blame it on poverty and the psychological heritage of slavery, while closet racists produce books like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's 1994 tome The Bell Curve, proposing a hierarchy of racial intelligence with East Asians at the top, whites in the middle, and Africans firmly at the bottom.

In Britain, however, there is both an Afro-Caribbean population and significant numbers of immigrants who have arrived directly from Africa. And while young West Indian males conform to the North American pattern and do significantly less well than whites in British schools, black Africans outperform both the whites and every other immigrant group.

According to the 1991 British census, only 9 percent of British students of black Caribbean origin achieved post- secondary qualifications, compared to 13 percent of whites. For young people of Indian origin the figure was 15 percent, and for Chinese it was 26 percent -- all of which fits the 'bell curve' hypothesis.

But the children of African immigrants, who have none of the crippling cultural baggage that Afro-Caribbeans presumably brought to Britain with them, did best of all: 27 percent of them hold post-secondary qualifications. If we must construct intellectual hierarchies on slender foundations, then the British data are better than the American, since they come from a society less permeated by the cultural assumptions of slavery -- and the British data say that we should put black Africans at the top of the heap.

Given Africa's dreadful history over the past few centuries -- slavery, colonialism, and post-colonial tyranny and poverty -- there is a delicious irony in the notion that black Africans may actually turn out to be physically and intellectually superior to everybody else: faster, stronger, and cleverer too. But in reality, it's probably a bit more complicated than that.

Never mind constructing hierarchies in which the various 'races' of mankind are ranked in physiological or intellectual pecking orders. Consider instead the recent work of Prof. Kenneth Kidd of Yale University, who studies the 'variability' of the genetic heritage of various ethnic groups.

Kidd's team has been taking DNA samples from a large number of individuals in various African tribes, and seeing how much variation there is between individuals in each tribe. It turns out to be huge: in one group of fifty people from a tribe of Pygmies in Zaire, he found nine different variants in a single stretch of DNA.

In samples taken from hundreds of people in every other part of the world, there were only six variants -- all of which the Pygmies had too. Other stretches of DNA yielded similar results: there is far wider variation in the gene pool of this small band of Pygmies than in among all the billions of non-Africans in the world.

Other African groups Kidd has studied have produced similar results. "In almost any single African population -- a tribe, or whatever you want to call it -- there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together," he concludes. Why is that so, and what does it mean for the old argument about ethnic hierarchies of prowess in sports, in schools, or anywhere else?

The 'why' is quite simple. Modern human beings evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago, and probably lived exclusively in Africa for the first half of our history. That's enough time for a great deal of genetic variation to arise -- but not all of it left Africa with the people who settled the rest of the world.

The human expansion into Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas was probably accomplished by relatively small groups of people moving out of north-east Africa. They and their descendants multiplied rapidly to fill up the empty spaces, but they only had the genes they left with -- and those little bands, from only one corner of the African continent, would not have taken all of Africa's rich genetic heritage with them.

The rest of the world got short-changed on genetic variety -- and there has not been enough time since for much more in the way of variation to occur, apart from superficial things like skin, hair, and eye color. It is Africans who have the broadest range of genetic possibilities. So how does that translate into the black domination of athletics, for example?

The wider range of genetic variation among Africans does not mean they are all super-heroes, in athletics or anything else. It means that there are likely to be more Africans at the extremes of performance, both physically and intellectually. Just as the tallest and shortest groups of human beings are both Africans (the Tutsis and the Pygmies), so it is likely that the fastest and the slowest, the strongest and the weakest, will all be African.

And the cleverest and the stupidest, too? Probably, yes, but the British statistics don't prove that. What they actually show is that Afro-Caribbean students who have inherited a post-slavery culture with low academic expectations will tend to do poorly at school, while the children of self-selecting African immigrants of relatively high economic status will do very well.

Genetic pecking orders are nonsense. Economic pecking orders, on the other hand, are very real.