Well, it’s in the nature of these sorts of things that they are more difficult to prove than things like plate tectonics. However, that doesn’t mean you get to take a short cut and jump from hypothesis to conclusion. Having said that, genes are found all that time that are responsible for certain human traits. If a scientist is interested enough in this and can get funding, it’s not an impossible problem to crack.
Thanks for mentioning this, as it’s the other “real-world” factor that argues against ever getting some definitive study done. Who’s going to pay for it?
(And I’m guessing that if Kenya had an extra few 10’s of Millions of dollars lying around, they’d spend it on clean water or schools, rather than trying to figure out why one their tribes are good distance runners.)
Someone with a lot of money and who is foolish enough to think that there is one, identifiable “sprinting gene”. 
Nope. Remember that part about “predictive”. If you’ve got your hypothesis, you can use indirect evidence, if you can directly show how experiments that produce that indirect evidence lend credence to a hypothesis.
Predictive, remember?
The concept of a ‘graviton’ hasn’t actually been proven.
Gravitation itself, however, is more of a description of what happens. And it does a good job of it.
Sure, at quantum levels it often breaks down. But with the tools of the day, Newton’s formulation of gravitation had tremendous predictive power. It not only accurately modeled the movement of the known planets but can actually be used to predict orbits for other bodies.
Nice argument: 9/10 people believe the evidence for the existence of ghosts is sufficient, therefore the existence of ghosts must be reasonable enough for the standards of an internet discussion board.
That’s not a good criterion. It’s flat out laughable.
Oh, it’s hard, is it? Whether or not your personal belief is that something is true, you can’t accept it as scientifically proven until/unless somebody does the actual work.
It’s a concept that comes more easily to a mathematician. There are a lot of things mathematicians believed were true but could never accept as true until proven. In fact, there are several we think are true that haven’t yet been proven. Examples include the 4 color theorem (proven after a century), Fermat’s last theorem (proven after a few centuries), Goldbach’s conjecture (unproven), infinitude of twin primes (unproven), P=NP (unproven), and so on.
Columbus had the same problem. He was wrong about the size of the world but got lucky. He just happened to find a sponsor who didn’t care that he was wrong. Sometimes you have to get lucky (and/or be absolutely wrong).
Actually, somebody already has an equally reasonable (and equally unproven) hypothesis.
Kenya’s after 1968, when Kip Keino won the gold at 1500m (not the marathon, though). He came back home a wealthy man. Suddenly, there were a lot of other young people who were interested in competing internationally at distance running. Kenya didn’t really start winning lots of events until the 70s.
He was, by the way, a Kalenjin. And that brings up another point. If the Kalenjin are the dominant Kenyan runners, how does the purely (or even mostly) genetic explanation work? The same (or similar) selection pressures exist among other tribes nearby. And there’s bound to be some genetic mixing from the outside (i.e. they haven’t been genetically isolated for any length of time). While it’s still possible genetic factors come into play, the fact that other tribes under similar pressures don’t show the same affinity for distance running has to be explained.
A predictive test of the natural selection hypothesis should indicate they also perform as well at distance running. Yet, they don’t. For this hypothesis to gain any sort of traction, it has to be explained somehow or the hypothesis modified.
And that’s what is meant by confirmation bias. While the genetic explanation works for the Kalenjin, it doesn’t work for other groups that share the same background. The exceptions that work against the hypothesis must also be explained.
The nerdy sneering top part of your post isn’t worth replying to.
Regarding the bottom half, natural selection isn’t the only force at work in evolution so all of what you say doesn’t apply (see “synthetic evolution”). And do you know how genetically isolated the Kalenjin have been? (Oh it’s hard to find out. NO EXCUSE!) What if tribal custom for the last 2,000 years has been you have to marry another Kalenjin?
And the predictive value is pretty clear. In any race over x distance between a Kalenjin and a European, I predict a Kalenjin will win.
This isn’t appropriate for Great Debates. And I’m reminding everyone to cool it.
And here’s a good overview of the “natural selection isn’t the only force at work” argument:
And here’s a paper hypothesizing why sub-saharan Africans are good distance runners:
Sawyer, G. et al "The Last Human, a Guide to 22 Species of Extinct Humans. Nevraumont Publishing, 2007. [“Sub-Saharan Africans possess increased limb lengths relative to torso volume, which markedly improves efficiency [in endurance running] because a smaller torso is easier to move long distances.”]
As to why Kalenjin’s in particular, one could theorize the founder of the tribe just happened to have a really high V02 Max (i.e., really good endurance athlete), or, the culture’s evolved so they support distance runner’s from an early age, have a really strong club system, etc. relative to other sub-saharan groups, all of whom, as a broad group, have a huge advantage over non sub-saharan’s. (I.e., cultural factors put the Kalenjin’s over the top among a larger pool of genetically gift endurance runners.)
Great- more hypotheses. Excellent 1st step in the scientific method.
Didn’t mean to muddy waters. What I think is indisputable from the evidence, is that sub-saharan Africans tend to have a body type that offers huge advantages in endurance running. Among that group, Kalenjin’s appear to have an advantage that could either be cultural or genetic.
It’s not that hard, and they haven’t been genetically isolated. No humans have been all that genetically isolated, and the Kalenjin aren’t significantly dissimilar in gross genetics from other groups in the region. A few minutes on wiki gets you that far.
But that’s really getting away from the main point about scientific hypotheses: if you have a plausible hypothesis, that’s not enough to prove it or even accept it as true by default. It’s not on everybody else to disprove it.
And that’s not much of a clarification. I suppose you mean “all other things being equal”. Well, what I’ve (very poorly, I guess) been trying to explain is that it’s very hard to be sure that you’ve really eliminated all those other things to make an equal test. I.e. how can we be sure that selection bias has been entirely eliminated?
Further, how about this scenario: presumably the Kalenjin and other nearby Kenyan ethnic groups share similar selection pressures. Or maybe not (in this case, why not? And show the work to prove it). Do they show similar distance running ability or is one group superior to the other? I.e. how do we eliminate confirmation bias?
And I note you’ve added yet another factor: cultural. How much is cultural and how much genetic? Is it just guesswork? Or will genetics always trump culture?
The original argument was for sprinters and that selection (natural or otherwise) accounted almost entirely for it. That digressed into distance runners and that selection. A plausible hypothesis is fine, but it’s not scientifically valid to accept merely a plausible hypothesis without further evidence.
Again, I’m not saying a genetic explanation is wrong. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it turned out to be true. But there certainly hasn’t been enough evidence produced to conclude it, either.
Careful. I hate to keep nitpicking, but East Africans are by themselves genetically quite diverse. And grouping them with all sub-Saharan Africans is genetically not supported, especially for endurance running. Remember that the OPs suggestion that a subset of West Africans is actually superior at sprinting, instead.
For this issue, someone mentioned it was discussed earlier, but I haven’t been able to find it. Selection bias has been eliminated in elite running events, I would say, because no one gets to that level without being very motivated (whether for economic, personal, or social reasons, I’d argue the extreme ambition is the same). And as mentioned earlier, running is an ideal laboratory, since you don’t need special gear, training, skill, facilities, etc. What other bias’s could come into play?
Not sure I made myself clear on different between natural selection and other evolutionary mechanism’s. The wikipedia article doesn’t make clear, but I’d guess that tribal people in Africa tend to marry within the tribe. Even if there’s some dilution, that doesn’t argue against a Genetic Drift / Founder’s Effect type argument.
And for possibility of a positive adaptation to spread broadly in a geographic region, please see my post above on possibility of “complete dominance” of an allele.
Sub-Saharan Africans have more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined. Not only that, but there are populations of sub-Saharan Africans that are more closely related, genetically speaking, to European and Asian populations then to some other far-flung sub-Saharan African populations. Considering that most of the evidence of any kind posted so far has covered a range of people who couldn’t feasibly represent, genetically speaking, all (or even more than a small fraction) of sub-Saharan African populations, then I would say that your second sentence is very, very far from indisputable.
Evidence for that?
(And we’re talking about ancestral environment here, not relatively recent population shifts due to Arab conquests, etc.)
Again, this is specious and sort of sophistry. Adaptations can spread among a broad group of people who share a geographic region. That they have other dramatic differences in their genome doesn’t affect the fact that they share a particular genetic adaptation (in this case, body type; which is clearly related to their environment (i.e., being lean and long-limbed helps with heat regulation)).
I predict that black men, despite being a global minority of about 20%, will win First, Second and Third in the next Olympic sprinting competition.
I predict that black men, despite being a minority of about 16% in the U.S., will dominate the speed positions in the NFL this fall to the tune of about 95% or more.
Now that we have some predictions we can sit back and see how good the hypothesis is. 
Any wagers regarding these predictions coming to fruition?
Great. You’re all set to prove how important culture is in sports performance.
:smack:
I have made an attempt to wade through the 10 pages here, and the argument that there’s a strong cultural bias among U.S. blacks for sprinting events is the biggest example of sophistry, and detached intellectualizing in the service of political posturing, I’ve seen. (Except for what I write…:dubious:)
P.s., emoticons are cool
Political? I think maybe you gave something away there. Your problem in this debate is science, not politics.
Not sure you understood. I’m saying that people who argue blacks in the U.S. do well at sprinting events because there must be such a strong love of sprinting in U.S. black culture are being political (and engaging in specious reasoning to support their preferred political stance.)
Science is clearly on the side of genetics in this argument…
Maybe. My point was that the hypothesis being put forward by the poster was not about genetics, and the test he was doing is not a genetic test. Nor is it a controlled experiment. It will not prove what he thinks it will prove.