I certainly agree with that. But I’d say the the total domination in speed events by those with West African descent argues strongly for the possibility that there is something genetic going on. Something that is not likely to be explained away when you take into account culture.
Why people feel so vested in fighting against that notion is mind boggling.
But Americans care about football because they are genetically inclined to do so. My god, man, what else could make sense?
Agreed, it’s like the Canadian hockey gene, the Dominican baseball gene, or the Russian chess gene.
You want a cite that slave traders tried to maximize their profits? That’s a bit ridiculous.
This is silly. It doesn’t matter if your slave can sprint fast. You have horses and where is he going to go?
Brazilians are far more mixed and have a lot more European ancestry than Jamaicans.
You’re argument works really well in sports that are highly “acquitted-skill” related. Like say, hockey and baseball. But sprinting, or marathon running, or being a Wide Receiver in the NFL use gifts, largely, that one is born with. Sure you need to able to catch, and that can be acquired. But you really need to be fast, and the amount you can increase in speed is not as important as the speed you have naturally. I was a pretty fast runner when I was younger. And a friend of a friend’s boyfriend was about 10 years older, 35 or so. (White.) I know him for about 3 years and never saw him burn a calorie are heard about him playing a sport. One day we’re playing frisbee on the beach and—zoom—he was the fastest out of all of us, who were all very athletic and in shape. And two of us were pretty fast.
Anecdote aside, the U.S. is a great place to look at this. If speed were a predominantly function of training and interest, you would expect to see that best college sprinters and WRs be dispersed at percentages that reflect those on high school teams. You don’t see that. What you see, is that the more elite the competition, the greater the percentages Blacks. That’s simply a fact. Not everyone can demonstrate hockey or baseball skill without being coached. But you can be the fastest kid in the school simply through genetics. We all now how to run. Very little of it is an acquired skill. Now when you get a bunch of guys that all have the higher baseline of talent and their competing amongst themselves, things like training, coaching and nutrition become of supreme importance.
Exactly. As if this innate physical ability wouldn’t help African Americans dominate in swimming or hockey.
I, personally, have a mutated curling gene. I didn’t even know I had it until I watched curling at the Olympics, but nothing else AND I MEAN NOTHING could explain why I find that sport so fascinating. 
No. Slaves were grabbed from a lot of different sources. The very old and very young probably were excluded, (although that would have no bearing on a genetic selection as the very old (men) who had been genetically superior would still be able to breed and the very young (boys and girls) could also be genetically superior while the haphazard method of slave taking would not have selected for good genes..
And anyone suggesting that this has a bearing on selecting the “fittest” should be better aware that in situations of extreme stress, atheletic superiority (or even male youth) is not a predictor of survival. Plump women probably have a better chance of surviving most extreme situations than athletic men when the threats involve temperature extremes and disease.
As noted above, this may sound reasonable, but it is not actually born out by experience. In fact, dense muscle and bone probably needs more fuel, leading to faster debilitation.
Meh.
This would be better answered by actually looking at records than using unsupported speculation as the basis for further unsupported speculation. Given the errors preceding, the “unnatural selection” would seem to argue against great athletes.
Believes is not the same as known and we would need to see the actual claims and supporting documentation before we accepted it.
The problem with this claim, regardless whether or not you are Jimmy the Greek, is that we have no records or even anecdotal documents that indicate that this ever happened. There are no records of any slave owner renting out a slave as a stud, even though we have thousands of documents noting that horses and bulls (and good sheep and swine, etc.,) were let out for that exact purpose. We have no records of male and female slaves being segregated so that only the prime breeders could “mate.” Instead, we have ample records that slaves entered into families in the same way that slave owners did. There was a lot of interference with the process, with some families being broken up as parents or children were sold away from each other, but on the other end, the very fact that slave owners often failed to respect marriage among slaves meant that slaves mated with whomever was convenient, most often choosing to marry when they were permitted, but with no authority choosing their mates. Until some evidnce (currently utterly lacking) is provided for the “breeding” scenario, it remains just the fantasy of people who do not choose to do the research to discover the facts.
Selling a slave who happened to be a good worker at a higher price makes good economic sense. Breeding two slaves on the off chance that sixteen or eighteen years later one might have a “product” that would bring in a good cash supply, (as long as the “product” did not succumb to the numerous childhood diseases that constantly ravaged society and as long as the “product” was not maimed while engaged in hard labor), would make no economic sense. And, for a true “breeding” program, one would need forty or sixty years to establish the “good bloodlines.” Cattle can be bred and judged in just a couple of years; horses in about three. Humans take far too long to become valuable sale property to justify the expense.
Finally, a point that makes sense. Not all the descendants of slaves taken from West Africa are great sprinters. It is entirely possible that there is a genetic quality among the people in that region of Africa that sometimes provides an outstanding sprinter. However, it is certainly not true of West Africans, in general, and it is absolutely not a valid characterization of “blacks” to claim that they are all great sprinters. Rather, (to the extent that there is any circumstantial evidence), it would appear that great sprinters show up among people from Western Africa more frequently than they do other populations, but still only as outliers to statistical norms, not as a prevailing trait of the population.
Which, even granting (for the sake of argument) some genetic component, probably indicates that there is a lot more interest and funding in sprints among the societies of the Caribbean and North America than in Western Africa.
Analyzing DNA can be a goods thing, but the inchoate “theory” expressed here already falls on the overwheling majority of errors it lays out.
I just did.
I don’t think it makes a strong argument at all. It’s hard to strip out other factors like culture, but somehow, each sport tends to be dominated by the types of people who play it the most, and that makes me think the answer is not genetic.
It’s not at all mind boggling when you consider the shoddy nature of the science and the nasty inferences people start drawing.
No. I want a cite for the specific claim you made. Of course they were trying to make money.
It’s silly to suggest that it would be stupid to breed slaves that were good runners? Why would anyone do that? Besides, that wasn’t even the main point. The main point is that there was not a Eugenics program in the first place. What is “silly” is claiming that there was.
Talk about silly. Brazilians are all over the map, genetically, and since that country has a population almost 100x as large as Jamaica, there are certainly as many Brazilians as there are Jamaicans with primarily African ancestry.
As opposed to African-Americans, few of whom are mixed.
Beyond that, yes, Brazil has an unofficial case system where the rulers tend to be white, but go into the slums of Rio or other parts and most of the people wouldn’t stand out in Kingston, Jamaica or Harlem.
The same is true of Cuba and the Dominican Republic which produce loads of baseball players but no sprinters.
And on that note, the number of black American baseball players has also been declining for several decades. You might think that those fast twitch muscles would help them play baseball, but for some reason it doesn’t. They also don’t dominate tennis, for reasons unknown.
Germans and Brazilians care enormously about football. But not gridiron. 
Anybody who thinks that both genetics and environment/training/opportunity don’t play into this heavily is quite a fool.
Sub-Saharan Africans tend to have less muscle mass in their torso, and more in their limbs, versus Northern Europeans, who are the opposite. East Africans are thin, with a predominance of slow-twitch muscle fibers. West Africans are more muscular, with a predominance of fast-twitch muscle fibers. The result? There will probably never be a world champion sprinter who isn’t descended from West African indigenous people, a world champion marathoner who isn’t descended from EAST African indigenous people, OR a world champion powerlifter who ISN’T descended from Northern European people, usually Russians.
And that’s just how it is.
However, anybody with any common sense ALSO knows that America, a very large, wealthy country that is serious about its sports, is going to produce top athletes of all types, simply because of drive, money, and a large/willing population.
If you took several thousand of the most talented young teenage male sprinters from West Africa and fed, trained, and motivated them to become world champions, really got them to take it seriously, then they would probably be on par with the best American or Jamaican sprinters.
Dude, it’s just common sense.
It doesn’t argue strongly at all. There are all sorts of ethnic groups that dominate all sorts of different sports. Now, if you want to say that it invites investigation of a genetic component, yes. But that is the beginning of the process, not the end.
I don’t think people are against the notion that certain ethnic groups might be more or less genetically disposed to excel in certain sports. Few would argue that Filipinos aren’t going to do well in basketball.
What people in this thread are fighting against is a bunch of folk-science being floated around that has so many holes you can drive a truck through it.
They are leaving baseball for basketball. As black populations have become more urban, it has become easier to put up a basketball goal than to build a baseball field.
They don’t dominate tennis because it’s a rich/white person’s sport, historically. Tennis courts cost more money than basketball goals, and tennis doesn’t have the cachet in black culture that basketball does.
The problem with this explanation is that it is completely USA-centric. Blacks (or more exactly people with west-African ancestry) dominate short-distance races in France too, for instance. And 1) this sport isn’t particularly popular 2)Blacks aren’t the main disfranchised minority here. That would be 'Arabs" (in fact often Berbers)
What you suggest easily explain why there are so many blacks and “Arabs” in major French soccer teams. But it doesn’t explain at all the high number of Blacks, and only Blacks, in a sport with a low popularity.
It also doesn’t explain, whether in the USA or in France, why western Africans are dominating in short distance races but aren’t in, say, discus throw or marathon.
Even if there had been some widespread, deliberate slave selective breeding program, it wouldn’t matter. There’s been more than enough time since then for interbreeding to eliminate the effects. Just look at dogs, which really are subjected to that kind of selective breeding; it takes only a few generations for your highly selected dog breeds to turn into generic “mutts”.
Eh, by then we can persecute the cyborgs or something.
Sorry. That does not scan.
You are claiming that blacks are “leaving” a sport with 1200 openings in the major leagues and innumerable places available in a whole series of minor leagues for a sport that has only 360 openings (390 next season) at the major league level, no true minor league, and a height requirement to get in? That would indicate that a minimum of 840 guys are just going home as soon as they fail to get picked by an MLB team to say nothing of all the openings in the minors.
You might have part of an argument with your cheap-and-easy basketball courts claim, (athough you have to ignore the large number of black kids who have been growing up in the suburbs in the last 30+ years to make it and the fact that the vast majority of urban high schools have baseball fields dating to the days when that was the national sport), but the notion that black athletes are switching from baseball to basketball simply fails.
Really? The physical attributes that make you a good baseball player also make you a good basketball player?
*Whooooosh!!
*