# Are African-(American)s naturally better athletes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 13, 2003, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-african-american-s-naturally-better-athletes/161192 "2003-03-13T22:12:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Tars\_Tarkas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Tars\_Tarkas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tars_Tarkas)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2003, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-african-american-s-naturally-better-athletes/161192/81 "2003-03-19T23:17:43Z")
> [@](#): > > Contrary to your final sentence, lucwarm has NOT insisted on saying that anything is proof of a genetic basis. lucwarm said > [@](#): > > Indirect evidence can and does prove a lot. so yes he is. socio-economic cites (minus the white surpremacy sites Google kept finding and is why i don’t search for stuff like this often at work) [http://www.law.virginia.edu/home2002/html/news/2001\_02/winning.htm](http://www.law.virginia.edu/home2002/html/news/2001_02/winning.htm) [http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/mar99eitzen.htm](http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/mar99eitzen.htm) > [@](#): > > Despite these discouraging facts, the myth is alive for poor youth. As noted earlier, two-thirds of African American boys believe they can be professional athletes. Their parents, too, accept this belief (African American parents are four times more likely than white parents to believe that their children will be professional athletes). The film Hoop Dreams and Darcey Frey’s book The Last Shot: City Street, Basketball Dreams document the emphasis that young African American men place on sports as a way up and their ultimate disappointments from sport. For many of them, sport represents their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair. They latch on to the dream of athletic success partly because of the few opportunities for middle-class success. They spend many hours per day developing their speed, strength, jumping height, or “moves” to the virtual exclusion of those abilities that have a greater likelihood of paying off in upward mobility such as reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning, communication skills, and computer literacy. > **[Terra - Notícias, esportes, coberturas ao vivo, diversão e estilo de vida](https://www.terra.com.br/)** > > Veja no Terra as últimas notícias e as melhores coberturas ao vivo do Brasil e do Mundo, Esportes, Diversão, Vida e Estilo e assista os melhores vídeos no TerraTV. inhibiting of black academic sucess as a cultural thing: [For some black students, failing is safer](http://enquirer.com/editions/1998/05/28/19850.html) [half the US](http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/08/hull.htm) olympic fencing team was poor blacks, i guess they must be genetically advantaged there as well… ---
**Author:** ![IzzyR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/2acd7d/32.png) [@IzzyR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IzzyR)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2003, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-african-american-s-naturally-better-athletes/161192/82 "2003-03-20T02:44:14Z")
**eponymous** , I believe that you are still missing the point. The significance of the continuous distribution is NOT that blacks and whites would be expected to have the same distribution of effort. It is that even among athletes who have made it to the pro ranks there is not a uniform level of either raw talent or effort. And that one might expect that as one reaches higher levels of athletic achievement the level – on average – of both raw talent and effort will tend to be higher. And since accomplishment is based primarily on those two factors, what is lacking in one must be made up by the other. So that if you have two players who you have established to be equal in accomplishment (say both have scored 20 points and grabbed 10 rebounds per game over their lengthy careers), if one has more talent the other must have worked harder. And if you know that one has worked harder you can assume that the other has more natural talent. The point is, again, that we are assuming that as you go down the ladder in terms of accomplishment, you will – again, on average – go down in terms of talent and effort. So that the average all star will have more talent than the average starter, and the average starter will have more talent than the average bench-sitter. And the average all star will have worked harder than the average starter, and the average starter will have worked harder than the average bench sitter. And so on. So when you take the 100th best white guy and compare him to the 200th best black guy, you have gone a lot further down the ladder in terms of the talent distribution in the case of the black guy. You are drawing from a much lower percentile of the talent distribution. If that 200th best black guy is more talented, there must be some equalizer. If that equalizer is effort, it would follow that – on average – blacks further down the distribution have expended more effort than whites – this is how the two distributions became unbalanced in terms of talent producing accomplishment. From which it would follow that the average black NBA player has put in more effort than the average white player. If this is not the case, it calls the effort hypothesis into question. I hope this is clear. If not I give up – it was really a minor point anyway and we’ve gone round long enough. \*\* Tars Tarkas\*\*, Mea culpa – I didn’t recall that lucwarm kept “insisting” that he had a proof, and as a test I did a search on the word proof and found it only in your posts. I missed your “prove” term. But even here he used it in the context of a prior term “know with a reasonable degree of certainty”. He would have to explain his position. But for the record, I would agree that it is generally difficult to “prove” things in a scientific sense without direct evidence. The exemption would be a field which is so well understood that all other alternatives can actually be ruled out. I wouldn’t think that would prevail here. My position is not that a genetic factor can be “proved” by the weakness of the sociological argument, but rather that it becomes the likeliest known explanation. As such it makes no sense to demand direct proof or to speculate about blacks selling their soul to the dark lord or other such nonsense. These may be equal in terms of lack of “proof” but they are not about to become the likeliest explanation in any event. In general, one of the common misconceptions that one encounters (a lot, on these boards) is that there exists one black-and-white standard of “proof” and that something is either proven or unproven. This is a fallacy - there are only varying degrees of certainty. Science may need to set certain standards to allow for uniformity of language and methodology, but there is no inherent cut-off point between proven and unproven. (I once had to explain to a guy on these boards that the 95% confidence interval commonly used in statistical testing is only a convention – actually the difference between 94.9% and 95% is minimal in terms of how much certainty we have). I looked at your cites. Extremely weak. The first is merely an article about some guys lamenting the fact that blacks are into sports and not media ownership. Nothing. The third, about Julius Erving, has no apparent connection at all. The fourth is about an interesting and controversial topic – you might save the cite for another debate, but also has no connection here. The fifth is about fencing – I’ve repeatedly noted in previous posts that a sport that is not widely practiced can be dominated by a small subgroup that practices it without a genetic factor. The second cite – the one you quoted from - is the only substantive one. But it doesn’t get you there. It makes the claim that black kids are twice as likely as white kids to think they will make a career as a professional athlete. This is a valid point in the context of the article ( a very good article, BTW) which is about the damage caused by false hope of an athletic career. But it does not suffice for your argument here. Because the fact is that for whatever reason – either genetic or otherwise – black kids _are_ twice as likely as white kids to have a successful athletic career. So the fact that they are twice as likely to think they will could just as easily be nothing more than a reflection of this reality. The only meaningful study for your purposes would be one that normalizes for childhood athletic accomplishment. ---
**Author:** ![IzzyR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/2acd7d/32.png) [@IzzyR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IzzyR)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2003, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-african-american-s-naturally-better-athletes/161192/83 "2003-03-20T14:29:50Z")
Right on cue, an article in today’s NY Times: [2 Scholarly Articles Diverge on Role of Race in Medicine](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/health/20RACE.html?pagewanted=all&position=bottom) > [@](#): > > A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians. > [@](#): > > Racial differences have arisen, they say, because after the ancestral human population in Africa spread throughout the world 40,000 years ago, geographical barriers prevented interbreeding. On each continent, under the influence of natural selection and the random change between generations known as genetic drift, people would have diverged away from the common ancestral population, creating the major races. Within each race, religious, cultural and geographical barriers fostered other endogamous, or inbreeding, populations that led to the ethnic groups. Also of note is the good old PC aspect. > [@](#): > > Dr. Cooper is also concerned that if medical geneticists were to prove that race is a valid biological concept, then social and political aspects of race, some not so benign, might also seem to be validated. And a point that I’ve brought up repeatedly in these debates: > [@](#): > > Dr. Phimister concludes that it would be “unwise to abandon the practice of recording race when we have barely begun to understand the architecture of the human genome” and its clues to the genetic basis of disease. It would seem to me, based on this and other articles that I’ve seen and linked to in the past, that the weight of scientific opinion, having debunked the historic concepts of race, swung too far in the direction of the no-race position, and is now edging back in the other direction. ---
**Author:** ![lucwarm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e19adc/32.png) [@lucwarm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lucwarm)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-african-american-s-naturally-better-athletes/161192/84 "2003-03-21T02:28:01Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Tars Tarkas \* > \*\* > > [a lot of blather about “proof”] > > \*\* I haven’t really made a specific claim about proof, but what the heck, I will now: If a piece of evidence has only one reasonable explanation, then that piece of evidence suffices to prove the explanation is correct. Keep in mind that as **IzzyR** said, there are varying degrees of proof. \*\* > [@](#): > > translation: i don’t feel like trying to disprove the money for training issue, since i’m 100% sure it is genetic, based on my gut feelings and what my astrologist said.\*\* Not at all. Either you’ve misread my post or are intentionally misinterpreting my words. \*\* > [@](#): > > you haven’t disproved many of the reasonable explinations, then somehow require me to prove them, by saying that your theory is correct because you’ve summarily rejected all other theories via argumentum ad ignorantiam or False Dilemma or some other falacy. \*\* The non-genetic explanations make predictions that are clearly inconsistent with reality, even without looking at “hard numbers.” Even you seem to admit that. That’s enough for me to consider them disproved. \*\* > [@](#): > > That would give you a little something known as EVIDENCE. As a lawyer, i am sure you should be familiar with that concept from law school days.\*\* Sure, and let me explain something to you: People are sent to prison on circumstantial evidence all the time. I imagine you’d make a pretty good criminal defense lawyer, jumping up and down and demanding “proof” when it’s obvious that your client is guilty. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-african-american-s-naturally-better-athletes/161192/85 "2003-03-21T03:42:53Z")
> [@](#): > > It would seem to me, based on this and other articles that I’ve seen and linked to in the past, that the weight of scientific opinion, having debunked the historic concepts of race, swung too far in the direction of the no-race position, and is now edging back in the other direction. I think that continuing to record self-identified race is probably a good thing, for a number of reasons. It will be interesting to see the actual articles from the NEJM, given that Dr. Risch played pretty loose with his comparisons in the quotes excerpted for the NY Times. For example, he compared “Japanese” to “Caucasian” to “African,” but “Japanese” is not a race. Do we see the same characterisitics among Siberians, Han Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.? When he identifies “Caucasians,” did he mean people of Europe, people of the Middle East, and people of the Indian subcontinent? All of them? Some and not others? Similarly with “Africans”: Negroid? Pygmy? Khoi-san? There was the reference to the founder effect among Ashkenazi Jews, French Canadians, and Amish (none of whom constitute a race while certainly constituting the _populations_ that we have examined in previous threads), but the references to “race” were inconsistent. I would not deny him funds to go looking, but every occasion in which someone has turned up a biological “race,” so far, has resulted in far less than was originally claimed in the popular press. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2003, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-african-american-s-naturally-better-athletes/161192/86 "2003-03-21T03:51:54Z")
I’m sure someone must have said this before, but race is like pornography. No one can define it, but most people know it when they see it. Or at least they think they do. It’s those pesky borderline cases that screw everything up! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-african-american-s-naturally-better-athletes/161192.md?page=4)