A friend of mine has suggested that some black people have more muscle mass or are naturally more toned and therefore don’t need to exercise as much, meaning that they are naturally better at athletics due to their distant history as slaves or as tribesmen. I think that this is hogwash (and I really don’t believe he means it in any racist sense, he’s just speaking about what he’s seen.) I’m curious as to whether there’s any truth to this, and as a logical offshoot of this how many generations would be needed to cause a noticable genetic change in a certian segment of the population?
Whoopie Goldberg says yes. Sorry no cite - she did a bit about it when Jimmy the Greek ate his own foot years ago.
Excuse while I go out to buy a 10 foot pole.
In a TV inerview, Jim Brown (ex-football player, actor) if blacks have a “natural edge” in track and field events. He replied that the champion sprinter at the time was a white Italian, so no, blacks don’t enjoy any unfair advantage.
Seems to me that most Marathon winners are from Kenya, and from a particular mountain region of Kenya at that. I suspect that they have an environmental edge, not a genetic one, but IANAGeneticist.
This guy wrote a book that says yes, they are.
This guy, meaning me, is borrowing BobT’s pole when he’s done.
Do a search in Great Debates. This has been discussed many, many times there. There’s no point in rehashing the issues again in this thread.
This is NOT intended to be any way racist (but will probably read like it is), and it’s going to be very vague…
And I don’t mean black and white to be racist, just the easist way to differentiate between those from European and African desecnt.
Sorry, for all the discalimers, but I don’t want to get in any trouble.
There was a TV show on this braodcast in the UK a few years ago, there was some prelimary research that showed that black people have slightly different muscle structure to those of whites; the black people tended to have more ‘short muscle fibres’ that are better for running quickly than the types of muscle that white people have. Also, black people tended to have more haemoglobin in their blood which makes running longer distances easier.
However, research into the differences between black and white athletes has been banned because of a convention (sorry, I don’t remember which one)
Tuco (who now wishes he had a 10ft barge pole to avoid this with, but this is the fight against ignorance)
Oops, it looks like I took 3 posts to write a reply.
Might I suggest that the ‘black man’ is more in the natural human state living in tribal villages and basically having a life of continous physical activities, while the white man had build up civilizations where life is not so physically demanding and over 1000’s of years have gotten weaker.
IIRC correctly, there is bigger genitical difference between different (black) people in Africa, than there are between nortern Europeans and Asians. (sorry, no cite)
To use the broad brush and say that ‘black’ people are better at sports requiering strength is indeed ignorant.
Journey with me now to these thrilling threads of yesteryear…
Why are African-American athletes better than white american athletes
Please help me dispel this racist myth
Athletes and race…a theory
There is also a great summary page of race issues with links to many other related SDMB threads.
Many hours of fascinating reading, as I discovered.
Oh man, I read about this a few years ago in a book my friend was using to write a paper about racism in sports. It said that, throughout history, both Jews and the Irish at one time made up the majority of basketball players and similar arguments about genetic advantages were made then, just as they occasionally are now for black players. Dangit. I’ll never find the book. But it’s out there, I swear.
Discussions of this nature always turn into Great Debates.
Off to Great Debates.
DrMatrix - General Questions Moderator
Certain athletic events/sports seem to be dominated by blacks. The non-genetic explanations advanced are pretty weak. This suggests that there is a genetic component. Of course, this is not the same thing as saying that blacks as a group are naturally better athletes.
I’ve heard of studies such as the ones mentioned above regarding differences in muscular structure between “whites” and “blacks”, but I haven’t examined them so I can’t say whether they have any substance.
However, as to the OP’s question regarding whether african-americans could be better athletes due to the selective pressures imposed on them by slavery the answer is definitely not. First off, four hundred years is not nearly enough time to produce any kind of tangible results through natural selection. The only way you could “engineer” traits into an indivisual in such a time span would be through an intense, controlled breeding program (like we do with dogs and other domestic animals), and thankfully slave owners never stooped to such lows. Secondly, since labor wasn’t the only form of exploitation that slaves were routinely subjected to, you would have difficulty finding an african-american (barring recent arrivals) who didn’t have at least couple of european ancestors. So even if any changes had naturally or intentionally been bred into the population they would have been averaged out by intermingling.
Your statement assumes a slow, constant rate to the pace of evolutionary change. If there’s anything Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould have shown, it’s that the pace of evolution throughout naural history has been anything but constant. Long, slow, stately spans of population equilibrium, with little or no evolution taking place, are punctuated by short periods of rapid evolution.
The sudden imposition of new, harsh conditions on a population could certainly cause a rapid evolutionary shift, as those that weren’t optimally suited to survive the new conditions were quickly eliminated from the gene pool.
NAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! not this again!
I’m too busy to bother now, but i will return with cites and stuff. just know that in general, there is no advantage to blacks in athletic events.
To Tracer:
I actually agree with the theory of punctuated equilibrium that you mention, but even assuming that theory is correct, and that slaves were subjected to extraordinary selective pressure, a couple of hundred years is still way too short. Also as I mentioned in my previous post slaves were not an isolated genetic group, they intermingled with europeans and they were gathered from a wide group of different tribes, villages, areas etc.
As soon as I wrote my previous post another argument against this evolutionary theory came to me. Why would the hardships of slavery select for large speed and quick reflexes? In order to survive the passage to the new world and be an effective farm hand it seems like the traits that would be most beneficial to you would be the exact opposite. The kind of hardships slaves were subjected to would best be survived if you had limited need for food, high endurance, and a rock-solid immune system. Picking cotton and surviving cramped, disease ridden living quarters while malnourished would select for relatively small, hardy individuals who would look nothing like a lanky, fleet footed Michael Jordan.
I wasn’t around here for the earlier debates, so let me throw my two cents in.
First, what the hell does anyone mean by “Blacks”? Most African-Americans, from what I’ve read, have considerable “Caucasian” hertiage. Secondly, the famous Kenyan marathoners are from a region very far from the West Africa regions where most African-Americans can trace their ancestery. Thirdly, most racial genetic research has shown that “Black” Africans have the highest genetic variation (within their own group) of any of the std races. And this makes sense evolutionarily since all races sprung from African emigrants, a naturally smaller gene pool.
So, we’d need a lot more than anecdotal evidence to contradict what we would expect from the known data.
Now, given the larger genetic diversity of Africans, if one postulated that the bell curve of any genetic trait in Africans had a larger std dev than the other races, then maybe that might be a meanigful thing to explore. But that would not give Blacks an edge on anything, only that one might find a few more of the extremes on both ends of the scale among African poplulations, not that the mean of that distribution was shifted in any one direction.
Is this a joke?
The non-genetic explanations, in those threads and in general, are wholly convincing.
One hundred years ago it was common wisdom to say that Irish-Americans were better athletes than white people. (Back then many did not consider the Irish to be white.) The Irish, and to a lesser extent German immigrants, totally dominates all major sports.
Seventy years ago basketball was totally dominated by… Jews.
Blacks are not better athletes; there’s simply no evidence to even suggest it. You name a sport dominated by blacks, I’ll name two dominated by whites, and I’ll throw in one dominated by Asians. It’s complete baloney.