When I asked Kidd directly whether his findings of genetic variability, which showed that blacks meant that Africans were most likely to show the most phenotypic variability in humans–the tallest and shortest, the fastest and slowest, the most intelligent and most ********–he laughed at first. "Wouldn’t that be mud in the eye for the bigots," he said, not eager to puncture the politically correct balloon. Finally, he turned more serious. "Genes are the blueprint and the blueprint is identifiable in local populations. No matter what the environmental influences, you can’t deviate too far from it."

. Imagine an alien visitor chancing upon a basketball arena on a wintry night. It sees a curious sight: most of the faces of the extended tree trunks scampering around the court are black; the crowd, on the other hand, is almost all white. This alien would see much the same racial division at football games, boxing matches, and at track meets and running races around the world....

To the degree that it is a purely scientific debate, the evidence of black superiority in athletics is persuasive and decisively confirmed on the playing field...

When willing to speak openly, black and white athletes freely acknowledge what we intuitively suspect. "Blacks—physically in many cases—are made better," says Carl Lewis, one of the best sprinters of all time, shrugging as if to say, "Does anyone really question that"...

But such anecdotes alone cannot resolve this controversy. Lewis's belief that he is a breed apart can be seen as either an expression of black pride or a simplistic stereotype so powerful that even successful blacks have come to recite a racist party line...

Even raising the subject of black athletic superiority brings angry rebukes from some quarters. William Rhoden, a distinguished African American columnist with the New York Times, derides it as "foolishness," a white "obsession," and an "unabashed racial feeding frenzy." Lurking in the background, suggests Rhoden, are racial stereotypes of black mental and moral inferiority...

MYTHS ABOUT HUMAN DIFFERENCES

MYTH: The genetic variation among European, African and Asian populations is minuscule compared to differences between individuals within those populations.

This factoid, which is a variation on the first myth, has been elevated to the level of revealed truth. According to Lewontin, "based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals."

What does that mean? Not much by today’s nuanced understanding of genetics, it turns out. Consider the cichlid fish found in Africa’s Lake Nyas. The chiclid, which has differentiated from one species to hundreds over a mere 11,500 years, "differ among themselves as much as do tigers and cows," noted Diamond. "Some graze on algae, others catch other fish, and still others variously crush snails, feed on plankton, catch insects, nibble the scales off other fish, or specialize in grabbing fish embryos from brooding mother fish." The kicker: these variations are the result of infinitesimal genetic differences–about 0.4 percent of their DNA studied.

As retired University of California molecular biologist Vincent Sarich has noted, there are no clear differences at the level of genes between a wild wolf, a Labrador, a pit pull and a cocker spaniel, but there are certainly differences in gene frequencies and therefore biologically based functional differences between these within-species breeds.