Doubling Down
29th July 2019
Angela Saini has an interesting review in Nature of Skin Deep, a ridiculous book about how racial differences have no role in sports achievement. Of course, that’s just nonsense, obviously so: some Kenyan and Ethiopian populations are way better at distance races,while people of West African descent always win the Olympic 100-meter. And so on.
Now you’d think that if if you were trying to defend blank slatism, you wouldn’t want to spend much of your time on your weakest possible point, any more than a PR-wise Stalinist would go on and on about how wise and good Katyn Forest was: how the Chekists killed those Polish POWs in self-defense, after a heroic struggle, etc. Arguing for zero physical differences between populations is that weak: everyone can see them, for Christ’s sake. And a lot of people are very interested in, and knowledgeable about, sports.
Yet, in Saini’s review, she does just that. She’s pushing obvious falsehoods – not just ones that can only be noticed by the elite that know how to do long division.