I have heard that the reason blacks tend to(seem to?) be faster than whites is because they have more fast twitch muscle fibers. Or an extra tendon/muscle etc. Now I don’t think that is the case, I think it has more to do with upbringing. White kids are always told that they can run, jump, play basketball, etc. So they don’t work at it as much. That is just a hypothesis, but I think it sounds better than anything else I have ever heard.
So, is there a biological difference in blacks that make blacks faster?
To sum up the many threads I have lurked on – there is no such concept as race that holds up in a scientific biological sense. Since that is so, it is fruitless to go on. You can’t examine difference between two groups if there are not in fact, two groups.
Oh, I agree that there’s no such thing as a scrict race as it’s commonly called. But that doesn’t mean that fast twitch fibers can’t run in the “family”. And they seem to. The percentage of non-black world class sprinters is very low.
You’re referring to ethnicity rather than race, which is a valid concept. There are certain regions where there’s a genetic predisposition to the traits that make a good sprinter (north-western Africa is the most notable, if I’m not mistaken). People from those regions and their immediate descendants are more likely to carry those traits.
However, there’s no such thing as a “black” or “white” ethnicity, so it’s hard to generalize on those grounds.
Of course there are fundamental physical differences between the races. Everybody has been too frightened to try and quantify them since WWII. They use terms such as ‘ethnic’ or who-knows-what, which mean the same thing as race. One of the problems is which differences are to be quantified to separate them. With the small samples usually used, there usually crops up some deviation, not statistically significant, but just enough to throw academic inquiry into a tizzy, people start to use the term ‘eugenics,’ and everybody gets frightened of the topic and backs off.
You can see how sensitive people get derailed. It reminds me of Mr. Drysdale on the Beverly Hillbillies, when the two muscle-bound brothers (some less scientifically minded people might call them ‘black’) were complaining of Drysdale’s giving their sister shorter shrift than the (some may use the racist term ‘white’) women in his employ. Drysdale said “Sure; which one is she?” Apparently, he was the only clear thinker of the group.
As muttrox said, the question contains an implicit distinction that does not exist; genetically, there is no such group as “black” and “white”, and indeed, Africans and persons of African descent can actually broken into three major phenotypical groups (along with other smaller ones) that are every bit as distinct in appearance as so-called Caucasian Europeans are from East (“Oriental”) Asians.
And I’d opine that the reason “blacks” in the US excel in atheletics is as much or more a social influence than genetic. It’s the same reason that there are many successful Jews in business and Irish Catholics in law enforcement; because their socioeconomic group holds that up as the model for success.
It may very well be that some Africans have a greater genetic predisposition toward athletics–whether that is due to “fast twitch fibers” or a more efficient cellular metabolism or whatever–but to try to distinguish “black muscles” from “white muscles” introduces a concept that isn’t valid from a biomechanical or genetic point of view.
In a study in Canada, a group of West African subjects were found to have more fast-twitch muscle fibers than a group of white French Canadians (both groups were non-athletes). But that’s a long way from demonstrating that 1) African Americans (for example) in general have more fast-twitch fibers than whites; 2) the differences found in fast twitch muscles are genetic; 3) the differences found actually account for black dominance in sprinting.
Here is an article by John Entine, a proponent of the view that these differences are “racial.”
The biological name for this is “population” and they certainly occur. Certain traits are more common in populations than others (pygmies and Kalahari Bushmen in Namibia for example).
However, the old concepts of race are definitely not correct. People with black skin have greater genetic variation than any other group and they aren’t more genetically related to each other than they are to other groups. This idea extends to all so-called racial groups. No lines can be drawn that way.
However, this does not invalidate some of the questions being posed. It merely changes them. A common, innocent, question might be “Why are black people better at running than white people?”. That isn’t a good scientific question because, as stated above, black people as a whole don’t necessarily have that much in common with each other biologically speaking.
However, if you change the question slightly to “Why are so many people at the top levels of running black?”, it moves into the realm of scientific possibility. This question merely asks if there are a population of people with black skin out there that have an advantage in running. The Kenyans and some Ethiopians certainly leave hundreds of thousands of other tough competitors wondering year after year. Likewise, the only people that have beat 10 seconds in the 100 meters race have all been black.
Opponents of these ideas often say that this is hogwash and that different racial and ethnic groups have been at the top of sports at different times over the years. That is true although other groups were restricted in some way from competing during those times. We now see the “unlimited” category where all people can compete (for greater rewards than in the past) and trends do emerge. It may be different now that everyone can compete on equal terms and everyone has the ability to train with the best techniques and nutrition available.
You can also turn the question around: “Why are some populations of black people able to run so well?” could be phrased “Why do no populations of white people have the ability to excel in running?”. Pursuing the question from this standpoint takes us in a totally different direction.
Nope. “Race” was a term conjured up prior to the understanding of genetics which often inappropriate grouped people of various origins and ethnicities based upon apparent phenotypical similarities. To talk of blacks–conflating negroids, Khosian (pygmioids), nilotic, the bushman/Bantu ethnicities, and Austrialian aboriginals into one collective group makes no sense from a genetic (or sociolinguistic) standpoint.
Race should be deprecated as not only offensive in implication and historical use but more importantly too vague to be functional for scientific purposes. The modern term ethnicity takes into account lineage and is thus a more appropriate and exacting term. It also acknowledges that ethnicity is relative, permitting a hierarchical breakdown via genetic lineage and/or linquistic classification as opposed to the historical and inaccurate assumption of “superior characteristics” and other such nonsense.
As for the term euginics, although the term has fallen out of favor due to its association with certain unsavory regimes who used it as a justification for supposed “ethnic cleansing”, there’s nothing inappropriate with the concept. Selective breeding and conditioning with animals is performed routinely to improve stocks of working animals and consuption livestock. Objectively speaking, performing the same with humans in order to emphasize certain traits–strength, endurance, intellect, appearance, et cetera–is a relatively straightforward process which is ethically repugnant only in the sense that it dispenses with the (inaccurate) notion of genetic eglatarianism, the hopeful mistruth that indeed, “All men are created equal.” Of course, selective breeding also has its detractions; mainly, in true-breeding to enhance specific characteristics you’ll also aggrevate the occurance of recessive undesired charactistics–in English, chronic health defects and physical/mental deformities. The hybrid vigor offered by a rich gene pool serves as protection for the group against the encroachment of genetic defects and adaptation of parasites and predators.
Race, though, is a useless and impossibly vague concept, except as a tool for certain people to establish a social distinction to suit their own ends.
Not true. First, race was a perfectly respectable subject for study until the very late 1980s when the evidence against the existence of races became overwhelming.
The term, as noted, for “‘ethnic’ or who-knows-what” is “population” and it makes much more sense than the older outmoded notion of race.
Consider these statements from earlier in the thread. While there is still a lack of complete agreement as to their accuracy, they are certainly recognized as having a strong basis in perception:
Note, however, that while the people under discussion are all “black” (or “Negroid” under the older nomenclature), the discussion is actually addressing two separate (perceived) phenomena from two separate groups. The “Kenyans and some Ethiopians” are noted for marathons while the sprinters appear to have ancestors from over 1,000 miles to the West along the Atlantic coast, (and if we travel 1,200 miles South, we find few noted athletes of either marathons or sprints among a separate group of “blacks,” (although they have recently contributed several medal winners to swimming).
So it is preposterous to talk of “blacks” as a race being “fast” when we are actually taliking about multiple populations with quite different (perceived) abilities.
Determining the “race” of a skeleton is something that physical and forensic anthropologists often get asked to do. If you lay a femur down on a flat surface and you can slide your hand under it, it’s probably negroid.
The proportions of people with particular blood types varies around the world, too. The proportions in the West, among caucasiod peoples, is different from those in the Far East, among mongoloid ones.
Negroid and mongoloid peoples are more likely to be lactose-intolerant. Some African peoples who raise cattle mix the milk with blood to make it digestible.
The main problem I see with the comparison with selective breeding of animals is that such selective breeding is done to overemphasize a particular trait. For example, thoroughbred horses are bred for speed. Genetically they aren’t very strong. They are fast but they require a lot of expensive care just to live.
I don’t think we are all that sure of what traits should be bred for in order to produce and all-around “good” human.
Actually, mixing the milk with blood does nothing to alter the lactose in it. What’s really going on is that the Masai and related groups who commonly drink milk as adults retain the ability to digest lactose into adulthood. In other world, the adults in those groups are not lactose intolerant, whereas the adults in many neighboring groups are.
This is, in fact, a beautiful example of why you shouldn’t lump “black people” or even “Africans” in to one group. In this area, the Masai have more in common with Swedes than with, say, Khoi-San. It’s an inherited biological trait that allows them to digest milk past childhood.
On ABC TV for the last 3 weeks here in Australia they have been showing Race: The Power Of An Illusion which helped me get my head around things that made little sense. The most edifying bit of information was that, while we now commonly believe that “blacks” have genetic physical advantages, it used to be thought that the black population of America would die off because of its genetic physical weaknesses.
Well, precisely. Breeding for, say, blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordic supermen results in a population that is more prone to skin cancer, sensitivity to light, and so forth, not to mention reinforcement of genetic defects and lack of diversity with respect to infectious organisms. The troubling thing about the concept of eugenics is that it requires removal–in selective breeding terms, culling–of defectives in order to reduce the incidence of defects. Taken to the extreme–as done in Nazi Germany–this means forced sterilization or execution of said “defectives”, a concept that is repugnant to any moral intellect. Even separation of populations–i.e. forced segregation–is offensive insofar as it implies that one group is somehow superior or more privileged than others, the doctrine of “separate but equal” notwithstanding.
There’s also this consideration; at some point, progressively breeding true for a single characteristic–say, longer legs, or more powerful muscles–becomes an exercise in futility. You can select for individuals who skew toward one tail of the normal distribution (we’ll assume for the moment that the distribution of variations of a phenotype fall under a Gaussian curve), but once you pile your selected population at the side of that curve it’s unlikely that they’ll extend it much further, both due to limited control over the complex interactions of different genomes that combine together to create that phenotype and the biomechanical limitations that prohibit indefinite extension of said characteristic; a giraffe’s neck, for instance, is already extended about as high as it can be without further increasing the size of the heart, adding more vertebrae, et cetera. One can see with large dogs, for instance, the multitude of chronic skeletal and joint problems that breading for gigantism (Newfoundlands, Great Danes) has caused.
To recap: there’s nothing wrong with asking about the specific genetic differences between populations (or finely grained genetically-common ethnicities), but the question posed by the OP is both too vague to demand an explicit answer and brings an (unintended) set of preconceptions to the issue. Shagnasty’s restatements of the question offer an approach that can demonstrate a measure of statistical or biological validity.
Can anyone explain the following? The FDA’s move certainly stirred controversy. The key word seems to be “population,” not race, but I’m not certain.
FDA Approves Heart Drug for Black Patients
By Michelle Meadows
The Food and Drug Administration’s approval in June 2005 of a heart failure drug aimed at black patients marks the first time that the agency has approved a drug for a specific racial group. When added to standard heart failure therapy, BiDil dramatically reduces death and hospitalization in blacks.
The approval of BiDil was based mainly on the results of the African-American Heart Failure Trial (A-HeFT), a study of 1,050 self-identified black patients with severe heart failure who were already being treated with the best available therapy. This study was conducted because two previous studies suggested a benefit of BiDil in black patients, with no evidence of benefit in the white population.
“We followed a trail of evidence which strongly suggested that there were differences between blacks and whites in response to this medicine,” says Anne Taylor, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and lead investigator of A-HeFT. “If researchers see differences in disease patterns between population groups, the cause of those differences should be investigated. Differences may be related to environmental, social, lifestyle, or genetic factors or to interactions among all of these factors.”
Yes, the key distinction is between “population” and “race.” “Blacks” in the US comprise a population, which has been traditionally been referred to as a race in the US. This population consists of those who have any discernable sub-Saharan African ancestry; as such it includes a fair number of people who have less than 50% African ancestry (their other ancestry usually being European and/or Native American). This population is defined socially (by physical appearance), not genetically. If one went strictly by ancestry, the effect mentioned in the study would probably be more pronounced.
This study does not demonstrate that this heart drug would be generally effective in other populations that are traditionally considered to be part of the Negroid “race,” for example East Africans or pygmies. Nor has it been demonstrated to be ineffective in other populations considered to be Caucasoid, such as North Africans or South Asians. Therefore it cannot be considered to be effective on the basis of race; the distinction is between American populations of European ancestry and those of partial West African ancestry.
Sickle Cell Anemia is a desease only occuring in black persons. The sickle shaped cells prevent the symptoms of Sleeping Sickness. A black parent can pass on the gene to the child and they don’t get Sleeping Sickness. The child has some sickle shaped cells and some normal ones is healthy and immune to Sleeping Sickness. A child that is passed the gene for sickle shaped blood cells from both parents, has Sickle Cell Anemia, in which all the cells are siclke shaped. There are genetic differences in races that don’t show up in other races.