You might also get into the cultural phenomenon that among Canadian hockey players the best players tend to be those who have birthdays in June beginning of the year and that there are very few great hockey players who have birthdays at the end if the year.
The US doesn’t have a majority of black people. But it still has a big share of 100m finalists.
I am not going to look, but I am reasonably certain they used self report. Anyways, if you want to say that the writer of the article that I quoted can’t properly identify race or that racial identification doesn’t correlate well with ethnic origin then fine, just do that. It’s ridiculous, but if that’s what you want to argue, go ahead.
The list of the world’s elite athletes is unlikely to constitute a valid statistical sample for the purposes of studying genetics. In this case simple historical accident or coincidence is a much more plausible explanation. When you’re talking about top athletes you’re talking about a tiny group of people.
I’d say the truth. We don’t know. It might be genetic. It might be cultural. It might be some combination of the two. What I wouldn’t do is say: Well, what you’re seeing is proof that blacks run faster than whites.
treis: It’s not clear what criteria were used, but what’s more important is that it’s not clear there was even postulated to be a genetic, rather the cultural, phenomenon that was being observed. But anyone who would use “he looks black” as a way of classifying someone genetically isn’t engaged in science.
Clearly absurd. Self reporting is a better method, but there’s no reason to think that visual identification has such a poor correlation to actual ethnicity to make it useless in science.
Are you seriously contending that there would be a significant difference in the breakdown by position of the article I quoted if it were based on self reporting instead of that reporter’s observations and investigations?
I’m stating that someone seriously engaged in science would not use “he looks black” as a proxy for understanding someone’s ancestry. I’m stating that any such study based on that methodology would be rejected by a peer reviewed journal. That’s where you find real science. However, it probably would not be rejected by People Magazine.
You didn’t answer my question.
You obviously have not read any actual science about race and genetics. There is essentially no useful correlation between genetics and self reporting * particularly* with a nearly purely social group like black Americans. Indeed there is almost no significant crossover genetically to group American blacks and Africans together.
The “self reporting” races as we know them * simply do not exist* as genetic groups. To the extent that geneticists are able to cobble together groups based on ancestry, they have almost arbitrarily given them names like European, African, Native American, and East Asian, but those groupings do not coincide with our notions of national or continental boundaries and no not predict superficial phenotypical characteristics such as skin color, hair color, etc. in fact, black Americans have been surprised to find that genetic profiles sometimes show ZERO African ancestry resulting from such tests. Simply put, if you are seriously looking into generics factors, broad traditional races based on characteristics like skin color or self reporting is little better than drawing your assigned race from a hat.
Race as you thnk of it, as something that can be self reported, is a social phenomenon, not a genetic one.
It doesn’t matter whether the results would be the same or different. It wouldn’t be considered good scientific methodology. It’s like I used to tell some of the guys I studied with in college as we were doing problem sets-- it doesn’t matter if you get the right answer if your methodology is wrong.
Besides, it depends on the particular sample set you’re talking about. In the US, pretty much anyone with 25% or more ancestry from Africa is considered black. That leaves a whole lot of people who are genetically more European than Africa who will be classified as black, and a whole lot of people who aren’t particularly genetically similar to each other being lumped together.
You’re just flat out wrong. Self reported ancestry is highly correlated with actual ethnicity:
Simply put, if someone self identifies as African American, they almost certainly have genetic markers that identify their ancestry as African.
As for the rest of your argument about grouping different peoples into one category, that simply makes racial identification less useful, not useless.
You still didn’t answer my question.
The slave trade (as a centuries’ long event) can clearly be viewed as a selective event for population genetics purposes. Discrete events within the context of the slave trade could be considered selective events. There do not have to be races for this to be so.
One example that might be easily understood:
In the people on one particular slave ship some might be herterozygous for a mutant CFTR gene which confers some protection against fluid loss to diarrhea. Such illness outbreaks were not unheard of in the Middle Passage. In an outbreak of illness such a trait will not necessarily protect everyone with that genetic makeup, but so long as persons with that trait are more likely survive to pass on their genes on average then there is positive selective pressure.
Anything heritable that would allow carriers of that trait to survive disproportionately would be enhanced in frequency in the next generation. That is how selective pressure works.
Some people have a higher fast twitch to slow twitch muscle fiber ratio. Such a person might have had a fitness advantage in the era of the slave trade and thus left more descendants. But it is not required because of a different mechanism, genetic drift.
When establishing a new isolated population, the potential for genetic drift arises. This is a somewhat separate idea from a selected trait.
The slave trade took some people from various areas in West Africa and relocated them forcibly to the New World. These enslaved peoples could not continue to interbreed with the parent population. Their opportunities to interbreed in the New World were limited by geographic isolation, having been sold in various islands or cities on the mainland. This is the recipe for a founder effect if I’ve ever seen one.
If, purely by chance, the proportion of persons enslaved in Jamaica had a higher incidence of high fast twitch muscle fiber ratio (as compared to thier home population(s) in Africa) then that trait could have increased in frequency simply by chance.
Cultural differences certainly may provide opportunity to identify those with genetic gifts in one way or another. But it is not entirely unreasonable to think that a population may have, on average, a greater proportion of persons with high fast twitch muscle fiber ratios.
Yes I did. I don’t know how the results would differ between a study that used scientific methodologies and one that used folk-science methodologies. They might match up and they might not. Folk-science isn’t repeatable, so you can’t use it to make predictions. That’s one thing that distinguishes it from actual science. The latter can be used to make predictions.
I have one question about the OP: who the hell is Freddie Fredericks?
Because if the quoted article meant Frankie Fredericks, he isn’t even West African…
No, you didn’t. You said the difference didn’t matter, which isn’t an answer to “do you think the result would be different?”.
To be clear, your answer to:
Is that you don’t know? You can’t even hazard a guess for us?
I notice that you have rather assiduously avoided reading my critique of his rather silly confabulation. Maybe a board where they have less knowledge of actual history really would suit you better. 
Sorry, I didn’t rate it.
This is very helpful. Thanks for taking the time.
Well, I agree that the beat was slow and I doubt that you could dance to it, but it was based directly on your OP, so I would have thought that it had some interest for you.
And I repeat my counter-argument : where “world-dominant” sprinters are from doesn’t really matter in this debate. Because there are many other variables that might explain why a given country has or does not have world -class sprinters. Mainly how much is spend on sports in the country and how popular this particular sport is. If it weren’t the case, the most obvious evidence that west-Africans don’t have an hedge in short distance races would be to point at the definite lack of Senegalese world champions.
What matters again is whether or not the best sprinters in a given country tend to be of west-African ancestry. Not “are there many world champions from Venezuela?” But “what is the ancestry of the Venezuelan national champions?”