Sorry, but the “doubt” of some anonymous poster on a message board on this subject isn’t worth a hill of beans.
Look at the top 100 100m sprint times in world competition for men. You see one Asian? Or pygmy? Or Eskimo? Different groups have obviously different distributions of traits. That includes averages and outliers.
If we had a betting sub-forum I doubt anyone would take the bet against my doubt.
I’d take the bet. I don’t see why Asians (there are billions of them) couldn’t field a world-class runner or, indeed, thousands of them. You’d want an economy that enabled adequate nutrition from childhood and a culture that put the same resources into training as the groups who currently excel, but if those two conditions could be met, I’m sure we’d have plenty of Asians.
Pygmies and Eskimos are single ethnic groups adapted over the millennia to very specific environments, but nobody is pretending all humans are genetically identical.
I’m not arguing that some ethnic groups are at a disadvantage at certain sports. Not a lot of Filipino basketball players out there. But China, with it’s large and ethnically diverse population is unlikely to be in the same category. Next you’ll be telling us that Korean women (but not men) are genetically superior at golf. It’s a stupid argument that has been proven wrong throughout history. Your doubt notwithstanding.
I’d never say that about golf, pool, or a myriad of other sports. Running seems simpler to see correlations is all. And different groups having different distributions doesn’t mean you look at the absolute #1 in a sport and claim that that is representative of distribution for that group.
But if the 99 of the top 100 are one group that one group may have physical traits advantageous to it in a distribution that other groups do not have. Running, while somewhat cultural, I don’t think can be explained purely by cultural influence.
Eh. Join date Apr this year. Do you know how many times this has been discussed, and debunked on this MB over the years? Search for the other threads. Not going to go thru this again.
If you think you have some new scientific breakthrough, publish your results and you’ll get a Nobel Prize. It’s just waiting out there for you!
Debunked to whose satisfaction? From what I’ve seen of this board I’m more inclined to believe that those who take a position outside the liberal orthodoxy with regards to controversial topics are never convinced rather they can’t be bothered to engage after being deluged with snark and personal attacks. And how would one get the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that different DNA gives different bodies? If we were talking about any other species this wouldn’t be threadworthy.
However, statistics are statistics and those who’ve followed sports have seen trends that cannot be solely explained by growing up in poverty in America and working harder. I don’t even think it’s a “black” “white” thing. I think it’s different groups have different bodies in part due to DNA.
To the satisfaction of anyone who actually understands science.
So a small % of Americans. Got it.
How is this a “liberal” thing?
The question was whether the slavery period in the US has bred a better athlete than some control group. (Okay , the OP had an absurd middle-school spin on it but machs nichts. )
That is entirely a different question than whether people from certain ethnic groups may have an edge over another given group in a specific sporting event. Tall thin people tend to be better runners than short stout people. That is a trivial observation and is pointless.
Preeminence in a sport requires not just the genetic combination that allows success (and the way genes are distributed among the world population means that the best natural runner living today just may be a taxi driver in Manila) but the opportunity and interest to pursue the career.
Bolt is an outlier and you cannot logically extrapolate from his performance to a general statement about Jamaicans or anyone else of predominantly African ancestry.
Everybody seems to be dancing around to avoid coming right out and saying that this looks like the camel of so-called “scientific racialism” trying to get its nose under the tent flap.
Again.
Unsuccessfully, again.
Or have I got that wrong, and it’s something else?
I’m not sure the reason but I’ve heard that yes, persons of African descent do tend to have increases in certain muscle tissue over other races making them for example, faster sprinters and stronger at least in the short term. However I dont see this being some sort of slavery related issue since many top black athletes are from outside the US or from Africa itself.
Now OTOH, that also leads to them having a greater risk of other issues like heart disease.
Generations of New Englanders made their living from the sea, fishing and whaling. I am certain that is the important contributing factor in the dominance of white men in yacht racing today.
Urbanredneck writes:
> . . . I’ve heard that . . .
Cite the medical research paper that shows this.
You know, sometimes the Internet makes you go “What the actual FUCK ?! 
”. This OP is one of those times.
Balderdash. It’s obviously all the fucking with Deep Ones.
It would be nice to question said writer of the OP, but he signed off immediately after posting it and hasn’t been back since.
So you are telling me that if you took any ethnic group they would have the same distribution of physical traits as any other ethnic group? If so sure, you understand political correctness but pc isn’t science nor reality. Now if you concede that different ethnic groups have different distribution of physical traits than it sort of follows that sport, which is highly dependent on physical traits will have distributions of results that are different for different ethnic groups with some portion of that attributed to their genes.
To say centuries of slavery had zero impact on genetics is ideologically motivated willful ignorance.
With as many variables that go into something like genetics and sports will one ever be able to say with any accuracy or precision how much is attributable to what? I doubt that. But to dismiss it entirely is pure politics. This is similar to climate change deniers saying man has no impact on the climate. Of course people have an impact on the climate. The hard part is disentangling the nonlinear variables and saying which does what. Which ought to be obvious to anyone with a senior year high school education, yet look at all the climate change deniers.
First step, octopus, is the terminology.
“Ethnicity” refers to a basket of cultural traits, and has nothing to do with genetics except that, because ethnicities are composed of family groups, they tend to be related. Ethnic groups, however, are never completely isolated, so you can guarantee that they share genes with nearby ethnic groups.
“Race” refers to much bigger categories. “Blacks,” for example, is a group of such mind-boggling genetic diversity that you can’t say much of anything about them that doesn’t also cover all of humanity. “Whites,” in contrast, are much more closely related genetically. In the USA, “Blacks” are an ethnic group, brought about more by shared common experience than heritage. Genetically, they hold genes from two (rather large) regions in Africa, as well as a chunk of genetic material from Europe and some from the pre-Columbian populations of the US South (this varies a lot). So an ethnicity which is unusually diverse genetically.
For that reason, any attempt to talk about the biology of black Americans is either flawed or responding to cultural / situational behavior.
American Whites, on the other hand, aren’t really an ethnic group. They don’t have anything in common with each other that they don’t share with non-white Americans except for some pallor and racial privilege, which is social rather than cultural (to the extent you can separate those).
None of this has anything to do with politics.
I don’t think anyone is saying this. In fact, slavery had a lot of impact on genetics – because of the widespread rape that came with slavery, many or even most African Americans have significant amounts of European ancestry. This fact, along with many others, demonstrates how unrealistic the idea of ‘breeding’ humans is or was – people can’t be penned in like livestock (they’ll get out if they really want to, unlike sheep), and people will generally be able to choose who to have sex with, even if you try to keep them from doing so.