You know who else is an HBD sports obsessive?

One of the most fanatical fans of David Epstein's Human BioDiversity-aware book "The Sports Gene" is ...

With Matthew Yglesias demanding ignorance and lack of curiosity about why blacks and Balkans tend to be the best NBA basketball players, it’s worth pointing out who became a sports and Human BioDiversity obsessive after treating himself to Sports Illustrated reporter David Epstein’s fine book The Sports Gene.

From my Taki’s Magazine book review a dozen years ago:

My longtime readers will find Epstein’s framework and many of his examples (such as his chapters on Kenya’s Kalenjin distance runners) familiar. But I learned much from The Sports Gene.

For example, the average man has an arm span equal to his height (as in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man). Yet every NBA player except shooting specialist J. J. Redick has a wingspan greater than his already considerable height. This is especially true of African Americans.

BYU economist Joseph Price provided Epstein with some intriguing data on NBA players:

…the average white American NBA player was 6’7.5” with a wingspan of 6’10.” The average African-American NBA player was 6’5.5” with 6’11” wingspan; shorter but longer.

Epstein adds that the average African American in the NBA can jump 29.6” versus 27.3” for whites. Combined with the extra inch of reach, that helps explain the preponderance of blacks in a game where the single most important metric is how high in the air you can get your hand. One scientist told Epstein, “So maybe it’s not so much that white men can’t jump. White men just can’t reach high.”

It would be interesting to obtain comparable data on the dimensions of Balkan mountaineers. On average, do the people of the Dinaric Alps have longer wingspans in proportion to their heights, like blacks do, or are they just taller overall than other whites?

I got interested in Balkan basketball players back in the early 1970s when BYU’s 6’11” Yugoslav Kresmir Cosic was the main roadblock to Bill Walton’s UCLA Bruins returning to the Final Four a couple of times. So, I’m not surprised that today, a Serb (Nikola Jokic) and a Slovene (Luka Doncic) number among the NBA’s top four to six players. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Balkan advantage was mostly just sheer height. They’ve been famous for their height for generations now:

But then, as Yglesias would attest, I’m an “unseemly and inconsiderate” person who is interested in the intersection of the human sciences with sports.

Then again, certain other people find the subject interesting too.

One who became preoccupied with Epstein’s HBD sports book was …

Paywall here.