Inductivist

A commenter on Twitter claimed that we HBD folks have a tacit belief that intelligence and athletic ability are inversely related. I've never read anyone make that hypothesis. If anything, HBD types would probably say that the two tend to run together since they are both reflections of health-promoting genes (or the absence of deleterious mutations).

I suppose this is getting pieced together from certain HBD-emphasized facts: West Africans tend to be fast sprinters, but have low average IQ scores; Jews, on average, are smart but you have to go back 100 years to see them thrive in the NBA. That kind of thing.

I looked at General Social Survey data, and found the following correlations between IQ and self-reported athleticism:

Correlation between IQ and athletic ability (sample size = 1,130)

Total sample  .05
Whites  .02
Blacks  .15
Asians  -.09

We see a very weak positive link for the full sample, but it varies by race: It's basically non-existent for whites, noticeably positive for blacks, and negative for Asian Americans. Perhaps smart blacks look at sports as an opportunity for scholarships, while smart Asians see sports as a distraction.

I would expect athletic people, on average, to be more conservative than non-athletes. The culture of sports and the types of individuals drawn to it are competitive and disciplined, and are likely to attribute their athletic success to their own hard work.

The General Social Survey asked participants to rate themselves athletically. This question was asked in 2004, so to look at voting patterns, we have to rely on a question about whom the respondent voted for in the 2000 presidential election. Here are the results listed by race and sex (sample size = 1,439):

Percent who voted for Bush in 2000

Whites
Athletic  63.1
Non-Athletic  53.0  
Relative risk  1.2

Blacks
Athletic  22.2
Non-Athletic  10.7
Relative risk  2.1

Men
Athletic  53.0
Non-Athletic  48.5  
Relative risk  1.1

Women
Athletic  55.1
Non-Athletic  45.9 
Relative risk  1.2

The data support my hypothesis for both race and gender.

It makes sense for conservatives to actively encourage as many kids as possible to be involved in sports. Or perhaps I should say competitive sports. A trophy for every kid is a liberal idea. 

There are positive correlations between IQ and both longevity and height.  Many genes underlie these traits -- it looks like there are health-promoting genes that manifest themselves not only through a long life but perhaps a better functioning brain and ending up taller. And a smart/tall/long-lived person might also have a comparatively small number of mutations that work against health.

Does being an athlete fit in with the rest of these traits?  One might expect height and athleticism to be correlated simply because popular sports like basketball and football favor bigger people.  How about IQ and being a good athlete?  Here are the correlations for IQ and self-rated athletic ability (GSS):

White males (n = 440)   -.05
White females (n = 553)  .01
Black males (n = 74)  -.09
Black females (n = 103)  -.14

For all demographic groups, IQ and athletic ability are either not correlated or a negatively correlated. It does not appear to be the case that there are genes that promote both at the same time (or that subtract from both simultaneously).

Now that I've got a little more confidence that self-rated athletic ability has some validity to it (I also observed that it drops markedly with age), I looked to see if athletic people have fewer children. Here's the graph for women ages 40-55 (General Social Survey, N = 401):
















American women who say that "athletic" describes them very well average only 1.58 children, while all the less athletic groups have roughly 2.1 kids.

What about men?  Here's a graph for them (N = 317):
















With men, we see a U-shaped relationship: the very athletic group has a mean of 2.39 offspring, and the least athletic men average 2.31 kids.  The average athletic group has the smallest families: a mean of only 1.66 kids.

We could interpret this pattern to mean that highly athletic men are more attractive to women and consequently have more mating opportunities, while the least athletic tend to be low testosterone men who are highly committed to family, which is an alternative path to a large family.

The overall results suggest a mixed trend.  What sticks out to me is that athleticism among women shows that same dysgenic trend with see with traits like IQ, education, and health: the top scoring females consistently have the fewest kids.

And let's not forget the study I linked to that found that athletic performance is highly influenced by genes (heritability = .66).

One study of athletic performance put heritability at .66.  In plain English, two-thirds of the differences in athletic ability are explained by genetic differences.

General Social Survey participants were asked to rate how athletic they are on a scale from 1 to 5.  I calculated the means for sex and race combinations (N = 2,373):
















Black men rate themselves as most athletic with a mean of 3.57.  White women (2.58) and women of some other race (2.56) come in at the bottom.  The gap between black men and other-race women is nine-tenths of a standard deviation (SD) -- a big difference.

If we focus on just men, the black-white difference is one-third of an SD -- a small advantage for black men.

The biggest within-race gap is among blacks: the male advantage over females is three-quarters of an SD.  The graph doesn't show the overall sex difference: it's over half of an SD.

While it's difficult to rate oneself objectively, these self-ratings seem to have some validity.

Do blacks rate themselves as athletic? In a previous post, I showed that blacks give themselves higher ratings on intelligence than whites or Asians do. Could this be due to reference group comparisons? People compare themselves to others they know in order to assess themselves. Perhaps the typical black person does not know someone nearly as smart as the average Asian person, so the black sees himself as being comparatively intelligent.

But it doesn't work in a context where blacks are arguably superior. The General Social Survey asked 2,373 Americans how athletic they were. The researchers are not too bright and gave the highest score to the least athletic (5) and the lowest score to the most athletic (1), so what you see is the mean unathletic score:


Mean unathletic score

Blacks 2.97
Whites 3.14
Others 3.13

Blacks think they are more athletic (although the difference is not huge). If my theory were correct, an average black person would probably know a better athlete than the typical white guy and would thus rate himself as being less athletic. But blacks are not doing this. They give themselves high intelligence ratings, and they give themselves high athletic ratings. Regardless of objective realities, their self-assessments are generous. For some reason, blacks are more positive about themselves than other groups. As I often show on this blog, the facts simply do not support the idea that blacks live in a country where they are systematically mistreated, run down, belittled, or made to feel inferior.

Wasn't self-esteem such a neat theory? On paper, it seemed to work perfectly. Blacks have always been treated as inferiors; they underperform; it's because they internalize the inferior label and act accordingly. Pretty neat. As is often the case with liberal creativity, the idea falls apart as soon as you look at the facts. "What's wrong with those blacks? Why do they feel so good about themselves? Damn, another theory down the drain."

Big surprise: Lesbians are the most athletic sexual orientation group, gay men are the least: In my quest to document that we're not all the same, I looked at the relationship between sexual orientation and athleticism. The General Social Survey asked 1,723 people questions about these two characterstics, and here are the results:


Percent who say they are athletic

Lesbians 66.6
Straight men 43.7
Straight women 20.0
Gay men 17.3


Wow, gay men even lose out to straight women, and lesbians are almost 4 times as likely as homsexuals to describe themselves as athletic. Lesbians even outdo straight guys by quite a bit.

Lesbians are overrepresented among women who are really athletic, but don't make the mistake of thinking that most female athletes are into other girls: lesbians are 1% of all women, and 4% of all very athletic women.

By the way, this study reported an additive genetic variance of .58 for athleticism.