And Andy mentioned the early 20th century and Jews…
I’m agreeing with you, octopus.
It seems to me that the loudest voices in threads discussing any possible genetic difference between races or ethnic groups sometimes make statements about population genetics that are just unfounded.
That program can show how easily large changes in gene frequency can occur over a short period of time with minimal selective pressure given the right conditions.
What does this have to do with the domination of Jews? Are you saying Jews are really good at basketball, just not quite as good as black people?
If the OP wants to talk about “extra energy in their muscles” wouldn’t you say that about white people? Pretty sure white people dominate strong men competitions.
I lump Jews and white people together. They were scrubs then, and they’re scrubs now. The point is their domination occurred in an environment where the competition was a joke. As soon as it wasn’t they got destroyed. That’s why they don’t dominate basketball anymore. It’s not like they lost interest and black people showed up to fill a void. They did everything in their power to prevent fair competition.
Better examples of shifting cultural preferences have to exist, if that’s the point trying to be demonstrated (I’m not sure what other point there is, maybe I’m missing something about why people love this canard so much). Maybe black people losing interest in baseball, but I don’t follow baseball.
Yugoslavia and Spain won 4 of the last 7 FIBA World Championships 
No one is arguing for what you are arguing against. You do understand the difference between all and some? No one is saying all American blacks that are descended from slaves are clones. Some people are saying that there was some impact on the genes of that population during the times of slavery and that there may be some variance in the distribution of that subset that other groups don’t have.
You make it seem like the OP is stating that all X > Y in a particular endeavor. When in fact it ought to be read that the distribution of X is dissimilar form Y and the extreme members up in the 4th standard deviation of X outperform, marginally but consistently, the members in the 4th standard deviation of Y.
The assertion, again, isn’t turning mushrooms into beets in 3 generations. It’s that already significantly different group being subjected to extraordinary and perhaps directed pressures have in the extremes a 0.05s advantage in the 200m.
Understood. My beef with that crowd is the claim that immeasurable effects or variables that are hopelessly entangled have no impact. Or that similarities in averages means distributions are equivalent.
Perhaps the horrors of forced eugenics, institutionalized racism and genocide, etc that discussions on human potential and genetics have led to in the not too distant past and arguably the present explains the doublethink.
Team sports are harder to analyze than “pure” sports like running, jumping, swimming. Basketball also was more niche back then. Now basketball has a global appeal and attracts some of the best athletes from many countries. Another problem with team sports is that some of the team sports that could have a dominant set of players but don’t is the appeal or cultural differences between sports. So saying for example X is best at cricket might be true only because Y and Z are playing basketball or soccer when Y and Z might actually dominate X in cricket. Running and swimming don’t seem to have those problems.
This is all fine, I just don’t see how it’s evidence that current sports record outcomes are necessarily somehow perfectly representative of some genetic hierarchy of inborn talent. Sure, it’s possible, but until I see the genes for various forms of athletic talent and their prevalence in various populations, I’ll assume that the cause of any apparent disparities is the same cause for various disparities throughout human history – culture and society.
I think most reasonable people would agree with this for the majority of sports.
That’s a legitimate point of view. I think it’s more likely that there is an immeasurable contribution from both nature and nurture. For example, no matter my culture or my society or my training, I am not ever going to be in the top 10,000 swimmers or runners and that’s because of my genes.
Your *individual *genes, yes. But is it because of your skin color or ethnic background or geographic origin?
I disagree with your logic. How do you know that your genes are the issue? How do you know that you would not be in the top 10,000 swimmers or runners if you had been training for it, and individually focused on that goal, since childhood?
I mean, if you’re actually an octupus, I can see where the genes would be a disadvantage in most sports (though you’d be a whiz at the Freestyle Camouflage). Assuming you’re human, though, I’d like a cite that your genes are a disadvantage.
White people can be good at basketball because it’s a skill game. But good white players don’t deviate from the stereotypes. Steve Nash is one of the greatest point guards ever (defense aside), but he can’t jump over a phone book. Good white big guys like the Gasol brothers or Dirk are slow and play under the rim. You won’t find white versions of Jordan, Shaq, D-Rob, Wilt, Russell, LeBron, Vince Carter, Westbrook, and so on.
One big untapped area of the world for bball talent is India, but they don’t care about it. A lot of bball fans were hyped up about the potential of a flood of Chinese talent over the last decade, but it never materialized despite a lot of interest in the sport over there and a decent training infrastructure. Yao Ming was about it and he succeeded in part because he was freakishly huge. So huge his body broke down from all the weight. Lin was American born and a flash in the pan at best.
On average, Americans who think of themselves as black have 24% European ancestry. 4% of Americans who think of themselves as white have some measurable African ancestry. While some of this comes from recent intermarriage and immigration, most of the first comes from slave owners raping female slaves and most of the second comes those whose parents were considered to be black realizing that they were light enough to appear to be 100% white, so they moved away, cut off all contact with relatives, and passed for white.
A cite? For my specific body? Let’s be real here. Let’s say my gene’s had me born with little T-rex arms or as a midget. You think I’d be winning a 100m race at the Olympics? No. Not everybody is going to be able to do the same thing no matter how had they try. If you are, for example a 120lb female or male, you will not beat the heavyweight male in boxing no matter how hard you tried or what you ate as a child. Genes matter.
If we could do an experiment with 50 people and gave them the same training, diet, whatever than had them compete in a variety of tasks there would not be exact parity. I doubt that all results would even be close in a many different tasks.
What is it about humans that makes their body structure immune to the laws of physics?
Yes, let’s be real. We have a forum on this MB called IMHO. People solicit opinions in that forum. But this forum is called Great Debates, and you’re expected to back up any claims you make with a cite. If you can’t back up your claim, you can always withdraw it. But no one is going to accept your uncited claim in this forum. No one.
So, it’s not our problem that you can’t back up your claim-- it’s your problem. You need to get real, not us.
Lol. So you claim. Answer this could you beat a prime Mike Tyson in boxing? Where’s your cite?
As if a random quote from a random source is proof of anything…
Seems like a pointless distraction, and I’ll side with octopus here. If he says he wouldn’t be a championship swimming because of his innate body-type, that’s likely true.
Some people are natural linebackers, big and heavy and square and strong. Others are natural wide receivers, lithe and fast and agile.
The only relevance to this thread is that pretty much all body types are pretty much similarly represented in pretty much most ethnic groups. Yes, Inuit are shorter and rounder, on the average, than Masai. But at the level of “blacks” and “whites,” nah. About the same proportions of linebackers and wide receivers in both groups.
You can’t really extrapolate performance in professional sports to physical characteristics of the races of the athletes. It’s a small, incredibly biased sample. That conversation is more like shooting the shit at a bar, which is fun, but shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
If you really wanted to do a comparison you’d have to get a representative sample and screen for all the confounding variables and test them in simple activities like running, jumping, reaction time, balance, whatever.
Professional athletes are s self selected group of outliers. Currently, due to social and economic factors, a high percentage of black American youths see professional sports as a valid career path. White families are more likely to see high school or college sports as a hobby instead of as an audition because they see their children as having more choices.
Personal anecdote : the captain of my high school football team became a lawyer and went into politics. He was able to fulfill his leadership ambitions and did not have the incentive to continue athletic training. I dare say that an economically disadvantaged kid would not have seen law school as a possibility and may well have gone into professional sports.
Everyone has talents and aptitudes. Which ones are nurtured depends on the circumstances of a person’s life. To believe that a high proportion of African descended people in professional sports indicates something about their intrinsic abilities instead of their social situation is oversimplifying and somewhat racist.