The Editor, Sir:

The awesome display of prodigious talent by Usain Bolt on the track in Beijing has generated a lot of discussion including the egregious assumption that Jamaican athletes possess a certain DNA that cause them to run faster.

In the 19th century a similar kind of thinking (ethnicity and intelligence) was being promulgated by social scientists and writers, for example, in the United States, Terman (1916) suggested that blacks exhibited "racial dullness" and inherited low intelligence.

In the United Kingdom, Eysenck suggested that blacks are genetically-intellectually inferior due to "crimes committed against their ancestors". These pseudo-scientific views found expression in Hernstein and Murray's Bell Curve (1994) book in which they presented elaborate evidence to demonstrate racial and ethnic difference in cognitive ability.

Racial thinking

This raises the question as to why athletes perceived as racially different should be suspected of having race exclusive genes. Or, as the Toronto Star (Saturday, August 23) phrased it, how could such a small country (Jamaica) produce the fastest runners on the planet? One answer to this race hypothesis might lie in the 19th-century post-Darwinian racial thinking, which was structured around assumptions of biological inferiority and cultural deficiency of "other races" particularly those from slave ancestry or those who were living in colonised countries.

I am, etc.,

BARRINGTON MORRISON

barrmorr@rogers.com

Canada