Or if the bone is ivorine, or the nares are wide, etc., etc.
The forensic anthropologists I’ve talked with agree that when they “race” a skeleton, they are returning a cultural construct (although a useful one for police), rather than a biological entity. You are saying that the person probably looked a particular way to which we can attach a cultural label.
Yeah, when I heard as an undergraduate about race being a cultural construct, I was pretty leery about it being some politically correct touchy-feely thing. But, as everyone has said, there’s no real biological basis for “race”.
Because it’s possible and it’s the simplest explanation.
The trouble is that the non-biological explanations require too many extraneous, ad hoc, or shy forces to be credible. I believe your common sense is colored by wishful thinking. Ask yourself why you did not acknowledge my citation of 2 great west-african born sprinters. I’m new here but I believe this sort of advocacy belongs in a different subforum.
So the fact that I haven’t pointed to a particular gene or allele does not invalidate my conclusion. If the FDA claims that african americans are better off taking BiDil, would you need to be told exactly what genes are involved before you would be prepared to accept it?
The point made over and over again in this thread is that genetic studies show it’s not that simple or likely that ‘Black’ athletic achievement is genetic. Having genes for dark skin color indicates almost nothing about what other genes you have. In some populations (i.e. African-Americans) there are some common genetic tendencies, but this is weak at best, and has nothing to do with the genetics of any other dark-skinned population.
On the other hand, as Colibri points out, other social and ethnic groups have dominated various sports at different times, so it seems very likely that current trends are also due to social factors.
Since it seems that the science occasionally doesn’t convince people, I’ll just say
You’re probably right: the examples of Al Roker, Clarence Thomas, Richard Pryor, Oprah, Gary Coleman, and Dr Hibbert from the Simpsons clearly demonstrate the athletic superiority of the negro ‘race’, just as Terry Bradshaw, Dan Quayle, Brittney Spears and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel demonstrate the clear intellectual superiority of the pale-skinned ‘race’.
Actually, there are already a number of problems with the FDA’s approval (which does not actually claim that they are “better off” with that medicine–they simply ran a study limited to blacks that proved its effectiveness for blacks) in terms of biology (although the cultural issues seem to support the decision), so this may lead to a number of erroneous “common sense” conclusions if someone attempts to rely on that example for “racial” medicine.
When the initial study that “discovered” the benefits of BiDil were re-calibrated for age, general health, and economic situation, the apparent benefit to “blacks” disappeared. Now, the sampling population appeared to be sufficiently representative of the overall population that the effort to use BiDil in the (older, male, chronically ill) black population appears to have been a legitimate use. However, that was because, between blacks and whites in the U.S., the population who receives that type of care for heart disease is skewed toward older black males with chronic health issues. BiDil appears to have the same benefits for older white males with chronic health conditions, but that part of the population has more frequently already begun to be treated with other regimens of medicine and exercise by the time they enter the demographic where BiDil is most effective. In other words, the effects of BiDil had as much or more to do with availability of health insurance and cultural lifestyles as it had to do with genetics. Basing future decisons on “common sense” erroneously drawn from that example would not be wise.
I wouldn’t say that’s a ridiculous explanation. It’s wrong, but it’s plausible enough that it probably deserves an explanation. The problem is that, first, even with rape of teenagers (which probably did happen in slave times), human generations are very long compared to most animals, and the period of slavery in the US was relatively short (far too few generations for selection to have a significant effect). Second, the breeding of slaves was not nearly as controlled as that of animals. Some slave children probably did result from the slaveowner deliberately choosing his strongest male and female slaves, but a lot of them resulted from the slaveowner or his sons getting horny and raping a convenient female slave. And a lot probably also resulted from the slaves themselves choosing who they wanted to sleep with, just like free people do: Most slave owners wouldn’t care who their slaves are bedding, as long as they still do their work.
“Because it’s possible” is nonsense as a justification for an explanation. And given the heterogeniety of both the proposed effects and of the black population, biological differences cannot be considered to be a coherent explanation for the dominance of blacks in particular sports.
Purely a matter of opinion on your part. Again, the biological explanations do not provide a coherent explanation for the overall phenomenon.
I believe your common sense is colored by preconceived notions about genetics and about possible biological differences between population groups.
[qoute]I’m new here but I believe this sort of advocacy belongs in a different subforum.
[/QUOTE]
Nope. This discussion is fine in GQ.
Why haven’t you actually adressed any of my counter arguments seven posts up except to allege that they are “not credible?”
That’s not what invalidates your conclusion. The fact that there isn’t any solid evidence on which to base it is what invalidates it as anything other than an opinion.
Yes, although there may have been some sporadic efforts at “selective breeding” of slaves in limited places for limited times, they certainly weren’t extensive enough to have had any significant effect on the overall population. Slavery existed in the US (and earlier colonies) for about 240 years, vs about 140 years of emancipation. That’s a mere 12 generations, vs. 7 generations since, assuming 20 years per generation on average. Artificial selection would have to have been extremely rigorous throughout the entire slave population for any result to have taken place in such a short period of time, especially given the probable multifactorial nature of the traits in question. (We would probably be talking about allowing only 10% or less of the population to breed each generation, as well as enforcing sibling or cousin incest.) And once selection was halted after emancipation, any selective effect would be likely to dissipate as people selected their own partners.
Agreed, but that’s not what I said. I said “because it’s possible AND it’s the simplest explanation.”
More than once now, you have responded to caricatures of my statements and not the statements themselves. I can only assume that you are in full “advocacy” mode and have no interest at all in the truth. I will not respond further to your comments.
You do have to take into account, though, the fact that social pressures and developmental prejudices that incline people to prefer others that look similar. This is clearly not an inherent trait–“crossbreeding” and mulattos in recent history are far more common that most people realize, even dismissing the effect of rapist slaveowners and their bastard offspring–but in certain areas venturing too far afield from one’s gene pool is (foolishly) ill-regarded. Of course, this isn’t selective breeding in the intentional sense, and this only causes a reinforcement of gross characteristics as opposed to specific traits, so the aggregate effect of any extreme or “superior” abilities tends to be diluted even within one’s own population, typcially forming a Gaussian distribution that is a subset–albeit, one with a median perhaps shifted to one direction or the other–of the distribution of humanity in general.
But it is definitely a mistake to begin an observation of behavior or ability (as opposed to essentially immutable characteristics like eye color or hair type) with the assumption that genetics plays the predominant role. Genes are a recipe for an organism; developmental and (with intelligent animals) social influences contributed significantly to the accession or retardation of the inborn talent or capability. A complex, highly developed skill set such as that displayed by a star athelete (or a research scientist, or a physician, et cetera) doesn’t just fall out of the genome; it’s a result of socialization, childhood and adolescent development and direction, educational and financial opportunities, et cetera. Some people are naturally better runners or students than others, but nobody becomes an Olympic sprinter or a neurosurgeon without many thousands of hours of dedicated training. To assume that it all reduces to fast twitch muscle fibers or better neurons or somesuch is to ignore the mass of effort that goes into development.
It’s hardly a “caricature of your statements” to look at the two clauses individually. Besides that, you have entirely failed to demonstrate that yours is the “simplest explanation” that actually explains the phenomenon.
You are new around here, aren’t you? You’ve mostly been interested in advocating your own viewpoint in the absence of actual evidence; you certainly don’t seem to be interested in the truth.
Fine by me. You haven’t exactly been “responding” in any substantive way anyway.
I was referring mostly to blacks selecting their own partners from among other blacks, not from among the general population. Any artificial selection within the black population for speed or strength would largely be negated once blacks started to choose their own mates freely. Of course, strong, healthy, or attractive people might still prefer to choose each other as partners; however, this effect would not be any different from that within the white population.
But maybe I am misunderstanding what you were getting at.
It is a mistake to conflate “simple” with “limited”; suggesting that genetic factors dominate without explicitly examining and dismissing other influences is unduly reductionist. “We assume the horse is a sphere to make the math easier,” may make a problem in heat transfer easier to solve explicity, but the results don’t tell you anything useful about the real-world behavior of a horse.
The principle of Lord William of Ockham’s Razor does not say that the simplest explaination is always correct; what it says is that of the alternatives, that explaination which satisfies all conditions with the least number of prerequisites or inferences is most likely to be correct. To artificially reduce the complexity by dismissing qualitatively significant influences makes for a logical fallacy as applied to this principle.
Nope, you summed up my point in a nutshell. Blacks (speaking as a loose collective population) may continue to display “black” features–dark skin, brown eyes, nappy hair–but will display a normal distribution of athleticism, intellect, and so forth. Given the extensive genetic pool that comprises “blacks”, I find it unlikely that the mean of the entire black population is deviated significantly from the mean of the entire human population; there is, as you indicate, no biologically explicable mechanism that would explain the mean divergence of a large, diverse population. There have been and continue to be, however, significant segretations of “black” populations based upon educational and socioeconomic conditions, suggesting that there is a stronger causal linke between these factors and differences in capability.
In any case, a proper assessment of the OP’s question should take into account to what degree these alleged genetically superior “black” athletes are actually disctint from the Caucasiod and other populations. Given that the extent of diversivation is substantially higher than generally considered–to the point that very few blacks can lay any claim to having strict West African origins any more than your local White Power jerkoff can claim ancestor exclusivity to the passenger manifest of The Mayflower–attempting to make an argument based upon genetic uniqueness is likely a futile effort. Dramatic innate differences between populations only occur when said populations are reproductively separate and are subjected to differential influences. Regardless of the relative influence of genetics versus socialization or other factors, the infusion of “white” genes into “black” populations (and vice versa) tends toward nullifying the OP’s speculation.
Claims that the preponderance of superior black athletes in the sports involving sprinting are explained by social factors alone are no more falsifiable than the case for intelligent design. There have been no scientific studies to coroborate that claim and I fail to see how such a study could be constructed.
On the other hand, The claim that genetic factors are involved are being tested. The latest I’ve heard of is this Australian study.
Of course that doesn’t end the debate. Further scientific study is proposed.
Well I suppose the broad noses of some Americans are not as broad as some of those noses in Nigeria. Yeah, right.
Except that we have seen successive waves of ethnic groups dominating different sports, so it’s reasonable to start with the assumption that this is just another example of that. Of course it could be disproved, but no one has done that.
WTF?
Something being heritable is not the same as saying that the races differ. Are you doubting that most American Blacks don’t have significan European ancestry? Estimates I’ve seen put it at 20% on average.
Of course they are falsifiable. If one were to actually demonstrate that genetic or biological factors were crucial, that would falsify the hypothesis that social factors were the only ones involved. I think what you mean is that the hypothesis is not proveable; but then no hypothesis is. If one were to demonstrate that there was no statistically significant difference between the number of fast-twitch muscle fibers and performance, or that there was no statistically significant difference in the number of such fibers between black and white Americans, that would tend to suggest that some other factors, most likely social, were important (but of course would not prove it). (And note that the research cited so far was examining differences in muscle fibers between actual West Africans and white Canadians, not African-Americans and white Americans.)
As others have already noted, this comment doesn’t offer much in the way of a substantive argument. That people with an African (or in general, non-Caucasian) heritage can be identified by parallel, environmentally-selected physical characteristics is not at issue; the crux is that the “black” population of the United States is not a homogenous geneological group about which one can draw strict conclusions as to their genetic makeup. Unless it is your assertion that all populations of African heritage share in this purported (and so far biologically unsubstantiated) fast twitch muscle advantage, and that this genome is strictly dominant and pervasive such that it is not diluted by ethnic intermingling with non-African populations, any conclusions you draw regarding the genetic makeup of “blacks” colletively is tenuous at best. It’s true that “blacks” have dark skin, nappy hair, broad noses, et cetera, but very few American blacks could pass for being of a specific African ethnic group owing to the genetic cross-breeding both with other African-based ethnic groups and with other non-African populations. “Blacks” may appear to be superficially grouped according to skin color, but the general genetic variation of blacks is, as noted, broader than any other general racial group.
The correct approach to the correlation noted by the OP is to look for the most strongly common factors re: why blacks, or more specifically, the population of (mostly black) elite atheletes (currently) dominate in sports and to make specific causal connections that can be falsified by challenge. Asserting that “all cats are black at midnight” proves nothing other than that the researcher has failed to properly illuminate his subject.
Of course the observations of other ethnic domination in sports in the past have to take into account that negroes were excluded. (I used that word deliberately for context.) In fact even today West Africans have much less opportunity to publicly excell in world class sprinting than people in western countries. Considering that blacks and whites have full opportunity today in the US education system to pursue excellence in sports suggests a whole new level playing field for Americans.
I’m surprised the estimate is that low. I’m not saying the races differ. What I am saying is that an American black of mixed ancestry doesn’t neccessarily lose his broad nose while a pure European just won’t be able to have a broad nose. This is an important distinction if we accept the possibility that a gene or combination of genes are only possible within those who can claim West African ancestry regardless of external genetic influences. The science after all claims that there is much more genetic diversity among blacks. A thousand superior black athletes in America is hardly representative of blacks as a whole. A few dozen blacks breaking the 10 second barrier is not representative of blacks as a whole.
Well, to be fair, YOU did not acknowledge Quercus’s list:
I’d like to note for the record that Dr. Hibbert from the Simpsons certainly counts, since you do not believe genetic populations, ancestry, or shared inheritance are relevant, and instead focus on skin color (“race”). Fictional he may be, and without known inheritance – heck, Dr. Hibbert from the Simpsons doesn’t even have cells, let alone genetic makeup – but he for sure has color.
Taking Quercu’s sarcasm into account, he or she lists no fewer than SIX well-known ‘black’ people who are NOT world class sprinters. Does that make Q’s list three times more persuasive than yours? Why haven’t you acknowledged his list?
Citing a given individual or two is a spectacularly poor way of generalizing about populations, let alone “race”.