Thanks for your endless contributions: You offer nothing except ignorance and mockery. We won’t speak again.
Well, relative to a trans-Atlantic sailing vessel, yes.
That’s not the relevant comparison. You said it was worth it to let 50% die. Was it?
But keep in mind that a ship can be used over and over and over, but a slave is sold only once (by the the original owner).
Most were developed in the last 200 years.
I don’t.
But there were those who did make that distinction. In particular, marriage between slaves was permitted and encouraged in quite a large number of cases and indiscriminate breeding of wedded slaves would openly flaunt a religious binding. While you may think it strange that would stop some people, religion was one tool used to keep slaves down, so it’s not something that would be indiscriminately ignored.
And I guess you didn’t realize that the rape of slaves by their owners (and subsequent offspring) further undercuts your argument. Unless the owners were themselves speed demons, mixing their genes into the pool would only dilute the effects of any sort of speed-based eugenics program.
Sure, there would be a range of view, like in any population. There would also be regional variations - as I think the Wiki entry suggests. In addition, there would be micro and macro economic fluctuations (like the Abolition, and the rapidly increasing demand from the English cotton mills).
It’s obv. a time of huge upheavals.
Perhaps surprisingly, I do realize what I’m saying. I just happen to think it’s likely many of those good old Christian owners liked a little action as well, and were perfectly willing to take the hit on potential income in return for several months of the companionship of, say, an attractive and erstwhile virgin teen.
I can believe marriage was encouraged. Less likely to go absent with a family.
I’ll claim the latter-the former was provided by you. When you claimed you could tell if runners were descended from slaves by looking at their names and what country they ran for(not what country they were born in), the very need for serious rebuttal went right out the window.
I’m trying not to be snide but could you actually study up a bit on the history of slavery in the US? You’re displaying a very broad level of ignorance about … well most of it.
Some of the high points:
Owners weren’t just raping virgin teens but older, non-virgin slaves, too. Not just because they were slaves but because women in general weren’t treated well in the South. Attractiveness had little to do with it.
While children of slaves were often sold, they were also often kept (Thomas Jefferson notably kept many of what many believe are his children as slaves). After the end of the slave trade, children became the only way to replenish the number of slaves.
If you are trying to breed slaves for particular qualities, as you seem to suggest, you don’t put a fertile female out of commission for a year or even risk it. The fact that they did is suggestive that eugenics was not a primary motivating factor.
Marriage to encourage a slave to stay was not a primary motivating factor in allowing them to wed. If, as you suggest, there was indiscriminate breeding of slave women, there would be little to no guarantee that a particular child was the husband’s. That’s contradictory to the concept of using a ‘family’ to keep him there.
Back to the eugenics angle, your would-be rapist slave owner eugenicists would be lousy at their jobs. Rather than do the same kind of bookkeeping and selective breeding they already knew to do with farm animals, you posit they’d simply ignore all their accumulated knowledge and just try a bunch of stuff. That makes no sense.
Basically, the entire known history of the culture of slavery in the US and what we know of selective breeding contradicts both your arguments and assertions.
Sigh… I thought that we’d have fewer of these threads since I thought that NDD’s banning might cause the scientific racists to not lay low for awhile.
Unfortunately, it looks like that didn’t happen.
I’ll note that the list Pretty Vacent is waving around does not have a single Brazilian, unless I missed one, even though Brazil has far and away the most slave descendants of any country on Earth.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if have more people descended from slaves than all the countries of North America and the Caribean combined.
Stop the watch! Thomas Jefferson finally invoked in post 67 (checks lottery tickets).
Great Antibob - appreciate your post but it’ll be tomorrow now for me, back to you then.
Post 68, actually. And I didn’t invoke him. He’s actually rather tangential to the point.
I think people have gone too far in the fight against racism and have ended up dismissing any argument that could construe a difference between races. But that is ridiculous. There are countless measurable differences between races. Japanese are shorter than Nordics, tropical peoples are disposed to sickle cell anemia, the Irish have more red heads, etc. Why is it so hard to believe that people from West Africa are better disposed on average to being better fast twitch athletes?
As to the specific argument here, descendents of slaves went through two very significant selection processes not all that long ago. First, there was the human element of the slave trader. They picked slaves that they thought would make them the most money. Second, they then undertook a journey where 1/4-1/3 of them died. It’s reasonable speculation to think that slaves were selected by both processes for size, musculature, and physical heartiness. Of course, these selections can cut both ways. One could just as easily argue that the journey the slaves took selected for slow metabolisms, strong immune systems, and less musculature, i.e. the most efficient human.
It is true that cultural situations play a far more important role. To use an extreme example, there’s probably nothing that makes Japanese inherently better at Sumo. They are simply the only country that plays it. But I don’t see why that should make us dismiss entirely the genetic argument.
It’s certainly possible, and some studies have been done. But we’re not talking about that here. We’re talking about a lot of conjecture about things, like eugenics program, for which there is simply no evidence.
Cite? Equally likely, they picked the ones they could get. It’s not like in the movies where bands of white guys went around raiding villages and picking out the strong, healthy people to enslave. They usually worked through intermediaries, who might be selling whole villages or clans into slavery.
The most commonly accepted figure for death during the Middle Passage is about 20%.
We’re not. We’re dismissing psuedo-scientific hypothesis about slave-breeding programs that somehow produced really fast runners (the last thing you’d want a slave to be good at).
“Japanese” and “Nordic” and “Irish” are not races. The short version of this debate goes like this: you can find differences between different local population groups. Some of those differences are visually obvious. Once you start defining grouping people into three or four or five distinct races, however, you start incorporating a lot of nonsense and arbitrary criteria like skin color and judging based on appearances and from a scientific standpoint it turns into trash. The idea that there are only three or four or five types of people is crap. The idea that, for example, people whose ancestors come from areas that get more sun tend to have darker skin or people whose ancestors hail from areas with more malaria are at greater risk for sickle cell anemia because it’s connected with a mutation that is related to malaria resistance are true and supported by evidence.
Any one else getting deja vu to the black swimmers thread? An OP states that some discrepancy in racial representation must be genetic, extrapolates out to black people in general, then gets shirty when people try to explain how genetics (and culture) works.
And to add to what your saying, the OP completely ignores the fact that many countries with huge populations of African slaves haven’t produced any major sprinters, most notably Brazil which IIRC took in about ten times the number of slaves as the American colonies did.
Actual mortality rates for the Middle Passage in the 17th century appear to have been ~20%. In the 18th it was less as conditions on slave ships marginally improved, maybe 10-15%, with an oft-cited guesstimate of 13%. The biggest killer on average appears to have been simple dysentery.
We know that in Brazil at least a sugar plantation slave paid off his acquisition cost in labor in a very rapid 13-16 months in the 17th century ( during the period of highest ship-board mortality ). In the first half of the 18th century that had risen to 30 months, which may have accounted for the pressure to improve sanitation on ships to decrease loss. Slave mortality in Brazil was 5-10% per annum and natural growth was fairly negligible until 1750, as male slaves were heavily preferred for the back-breaking labor and importation was still cheaper than a dozen years of investment or more in rearing children.
Which doesn’t speak directly to Jamaica, but it doesn’t appear that Jamaican plantation slavery was all that much more pleasant than in Brazil. Trevor Burnard in Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World ( 2004, University of North Carolina Press ) asserts that in fact mortality rates in Jamaica were severe and birth rates so low to the point that there, as in Brazil, that there was no real natural growth and the slave population was overwhelmingly maintained by imports, not breeding. One claim is that 800,000 slaves were imported into Jamaica vs. 100,000 into Virginia, but Virginia had a larger black population than Jamaica at the close of the British slave trade - cite.
So there appears to have been little breeding of slaves in the Jamaican plantation systems ( the great, great bulk of exploitation in the Caribbean was for sugar production ), much of the natural population increase was probably post-emancipation. So color me extremely skeptical of this notion of organized breeding for super-slaves.
Sounds perfectly sensible, but…
Actually, there is no “but”. It’s just perfectly sensible. And if you look at the fattest humans in the world and the people who dominate the speed positions in the NFL, it starts to become very reasonable.
“If you look at” can be a good starting point for science, but it’s often a terrible basis for drawing conclusions because it invites all kinds of fallacious reasoning. We’ve already seen a bunch of examples in this thread.
So your suggestion is that since there are no Russians, Germans, or Brazilians in “the speed positions in the NFL” that means that they lack the genes to do so?
That seems a little bizzare.
Isn’t a better explanation that Americans play and care about football vastly more so than do Russians, Germans, and Brazilians?