# Do African-Americans have extra energy in their muscles?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-african-americans-have-extra-energy-in-their-muscles/724906>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [July 12, 2015, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-african-americans-have-extra-energy-in-their-muscles/724906 "2015-07-12T01:35:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 133

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**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2015, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-african-americans-have-extra-energy-in-their-muscles/724906/133 "2015-07-14T18:42:54Z")

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> [@DrFidelius](#):
>
> Unless you can show a genetic component to job selection, including choosing to be a professional athlete, I will continue to maintain that the decision to pursue a sports career is a social and cultural decision.

Asking for at the moment impossible proof while asserting something even more unlikely is willful ignorance. You are in fact saying that success in sports is 100% cultural?

But here’s more evidence you are incorrect in asserting that it’s 100% cultural. [Why Kenyans Make Such Great Runners: A Story of Genes and Cultures - The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/why-kenyans-make-such-great-runners-a-story-of-genes-and-cultures/256015/)

Here’s a short excerpt from that article.

> [@](#):
>
> It turns out that Kenyans’ success may be innate. Two separate, European-led studies in a\*\* small region in western Kenya, which produces most of the race-winners\*\*, found that young men there could, with only a few months training, reliably outperform some of the West’s best professional runners. In other words, they appeared to have a physical advantage that is common to their community, making it probably genetic. The studies found significant differences in body mass index and bone structure between the Western pros and the Kenyan amateurs who had bested them.

With a few months training young men beat the best Western professional runners. Who have access to the best sports science, money, and food in the world. Seems likely that bus riding Kenyan’s just happen to have the ‘culture’ that disproportionately represents them in a long distance running compared to every other ethnicity or tribe in the world. Hell, it seems like the cheapest method for western runners to compete in long distance running is to take a multi-year teen sabbatical to Kenya. Screw training.

But since we don’t have definitive proof that at least some success in sport which is dependent on body can be attributed to genes it therefore must follow that it’s more likely that it’s 100% cultural? That’s purely ideology clouding reason.

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