Martin Henry

Eulalee Thompson has opened a really big can of worms.

From Jesse Owens, destroying the Nazi myth of Aryan superiority at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, to Asafa Powell scorching tracks around the world in 2006 "talented black people seem to have an edge over other racial groups in a wide range of athletic activities requiring speed and power."

The more we know about the human genome, and a major Human Genome mapping project has recently been completed, the more we realise that very little separates human beings at the level of genetic composition. But small differences can have large effects. Scientific American in a December 2003 article raised again the question, 'Does Race Exist?' and answered, "If races are defined as genetically discrete groups, no. But researchers can use some genetic information to group individuals into clusters with medical relevance."

But we see differences in physical appearance among people. These differences, though, which we choose to use to define 'race', vary in a complete continuum, as we in the melting pot-Caribbean know so very well.

Shaped by environment

Eulalee reported on The Gleaner's health page on Wednesday, Novem-ber 15, some interesting black pride work by Professor Errol Morrison and Patrick Cooper in the West Indian Medical Journal. Essen-tially, the story, backed up by heavy research, is that black people have physical characteristics like effi-ciency of oxygen consumption and muscle fibre function, and body form, which were shaped by their African environment and which disproportionately produce Owenses and Powells.

The following week, Dr. William Aiken, head of urology, at the University Hospital of the West Indies, floated his testosterone and the slave trade hypothesis as to why Jamaicans, in particular, have been disproportionately among the fastest men in the world, but having high incidences of prostate cancer, high levels of aggression, and high murder and road accident and fatality rates - and high levels of promiscuity.

Some of the most vilified researchers have been those who have attempted to break the taboo and seek to probe if indeed there are any race-based genes-based differences in human intellectual capacity. Among them are the 'racists' Arthur Jensen, whose office was picketed at Berkeley and against whom death threats were issued, and Hans Eysenck, who was once punched in the nose while presenting his views on differential race IQ at the London School of Economics.

In 1994, Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, which defended race differentiation in intelligence. The fat book became a bestseller and set off a major firestorm.

Jensen was one of 52 signatories to the editorial 'Mainstream Science on Intelligence', by Linda Gottfredson, which was published in the Wall Street Journal, since no scientific journal would carry it. The article defended the findings on race and intelligence in The Bell Curve.

Eysenck wrote in his autobiography, Rebel with a Cause: "I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts." How good were his 'facts'? Mostly, we prefer not to know.

What is intelligence?

"The question of whether IQ differences between blacks and whites have a genetic basis goes back at least a thousand years, to the time when the Moors invaded Europe," writes Richard Nisbett. "The Moors speculated that Europeans might be congenitally incapable of abstract thought. But, by the 19th century, most Europeans probably believed that they were congenitally superior to Africans in intellectual skills."

A big part of the controversy over race and intelligence is just what is meant by intelligence and how to measure it. Fuzzy as the concept is, we have come to equate humanness and human equality with 'intelligence'; hence the big fear. Blacks like Thomas Sowell (and I) who are prepared to calmly weigh the evidence are often viewed as despicable 'traitors'. We self-assuredly prefer to think that we have nothing to fear if research on intellectual differentiation can contend as freely as that on physical differentiation.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist.