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To avoid misunderstandings, Entine makes it clear from the outset that he is talking about groups, not individuals: It is not the case that all or most blacks are better athletes than members of other racial groups, only that over the entire population, there are higher odds that some individuals will be faster or able to jump higher than individuals from other populations. The black guy playing corner in a pickup football game may or may not be a better athlete than the white wide receiver lined up opposite him, but there's no statistical reason to assume he is -- genetics doesn't work that way. But when you leave the sandlot and move up to the level where the world's elite athletes compete -- world-class track meets, the Olympics, the NFL and the NBA -- genetics confers the tiny advantage that separates starters from bench-warmers, world record holders from also-rans.

Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It By Jon Entine Public Affairs, 387 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Entine also addresses an even more volatile subject: the unfair devaluation of black athletes' blood, sweat and tears that can all too easily accompany encomiums to their "natural abilities." He is at pains to point out that having a genetic advantage doesn't automatically confer success: Black athletes have to work as hard as athletes of other races if they want to reach the top. Their success is a result of a "unique confluence of cultural and genetic forces."

"The importance of the individual remains paramount," Entine emphasizes. "Winning athletic competitions does not make one superior in any moral sense. It does signify that you have hit on your lucky number playing the roulette wheel of genetics, cultural serendipity, and individual drive."

Both great genes and great discipline are required to reach world-class athletic status. The greatest wide receiver of all time, the 49ers' Jerry Rice, might have been gifted with West African genes that gave him speed and explosiveness, but those genes didn't make him design and stay with an offseason hill-sprinting exercise regimen so brutal that superbly conditioned teammates vomited and collapsed while trying to stay with him. Rice made a catch for a key first down in one of the great drives in pro football history, the legendary 92-yard, fourth-quarter, game-winning drive in Super Bowl XXIII. On 2nd and 25, facing another world-class athlete perhaps carrying similar genes, when Rice's exhausted body needed to come up with one final burst, one more cut executed at full speed with no give-away body lean, with enough concentration left at the end of the pattern to reach far out and up and make the grab, it wasn't his genes that allowed him to do it -- it was those agonizing hours spent running up that mountain, hours of pain spent so that at the end of a game, sucking air, he would have maybe 2 percent more left in his tank than the guy covering him.

Most important of all, Entine refutes the idea that there is any sinister corollary to black genetic superiority in athletics. This is, of course, the real reason why this subject is so loaded. "The elephant in the living room is intelligence," Entine notes. "In the familiar if erroneous calculus, I.Q. and athleticism are inversely proportional." Entine points out that there is no scientific support for this idea and dismisses it out of hand. Whether it will find fertile ground for a rebirth in books like Entine's is another question.

In support of his thesis, Entine relies on two different bodies of evidence: the undeniable, but scientifically "soft," record of black athletic achievement, and the still contested but increasingly accepted theories of anthropologists, physiologists and geneticists. Neither alone is decisive, but taken together, they are -- to a layman -- pretty convincing.

Entine breezes through an endless list of stellar athletic achievements by blacks. Track records are the most impressive, of course, but he also throws in some fascinating lesser-known studies, like one undertaken by the famous baseball "sabermetrician," the statistics-obsessed baseball analyst Bill James. In a 1987 study, trying to figure out what factors best predicted which rookies would become baseball stars, he compared the careers of 54 white rookies against those of 54 black rookies with comparable statistics. Greatly to his surprise, he found that, on the whole, the black rookies went on to have better major league careers than the whites; the black players hit 66 percent more home runs, stole 400 percent more bases, etc. He repeated the study with 49 more pairs and got similar results. Race, it turned out, was the single best predictor of stardom -- and this in a sport in which blacks dominate less than in football or basketball, perhaps at least partially because West African genes confer less of an advantage in baseball. Such studies are obviously not going to end up in the New England Journal of Medicine, but they aren't meaningless, either.

Next page | Why do whites still dominate the quarterback position?