I’m telling you that you should not pretend I said something I did not say. Got it?
My wife and I are both white with marketable degrees. Mine is a STEM field hers is physician. If any of our children could be a pro athlete instead of a lawyer we’d encourage them to go as far as possible in athletics as a priority. With more whites in poverty than blacks and with the allure of multi million dollar annual contracts and the sports frenzied communities that exist I doubt the cultural incentives to excel in sport are a 100% the reason.
Thinking that culture is 100% the reason and genetic differences in populations are 0% is the real oversimplification and the playing of the race card is just pathetic. 100% culture advocates are similar to climate change deniers in that they demand an impossible burden of proof yet make equally strong assertions about a stance that is even less probable with just as little definitive proof. Why? Ideology.
My point was that I have no way of knowing whether your claim is factual, or whether it’s merely a belief.
I am not an athlete. There might be a genetic reason I can’t be, but it could be just that I’ve never tried. And in contemporary competetive sports, “tried” means “focus intensively on that goal for years at a time while a youth.” If you had genetic testing done, I’ll take your word for it, but if not, how do you know it’s the genes that are determinative?
Is that you Jimmy the Greek?
I don’t know with 100% certainty if my particular set of genes with the right training, nutrition , and supplements could or could not have made it into the top 10,000. I might have even been able to beat a prime Mike Tyson. That said knowing my body and mind I have severe doubts if either were probable.
I am not sure but something that may be bothering some is the idea that what is being proposed is that all blacks have an advantage in let’s say running. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that.
Fair enough!
The OP played the race card, which poisoned the ground a little bit.
I would tend to agree with this. In high school sports, it seems that the racial profiles of the players generally match that of the student body. But when those players move on to college, the more privileged players have more options available and may not continue with sports. But for a disadvantaged player, sports may be their only path into college.
I remember reading something (maybe in the “Blind Side”?) which said how many college football players just leave campus after their last game and not graduate. The only reason they were there was to play football, not to get a degree. If they didn’t feel they had an option to go into the pros, they didn’t have a reason to stick around.
I’m sure lots of people would love to be in pro sports, but it takes a lot of work and sacrifice and the chance of success is very, very small. It only makes sense to purse that path if you are very, very good or else don’t have many other options.
Competition is not quite as high at the average high school as at the average D1 football playing school. Even if median performance is the same in each demographic the way the distribution curve continues beyond the median in either direction is unlikely to exactly the same. And little differences matter when a 0.1s difference in a 40yd is desired and an extra 1 inch in the vertical is desired.
Now whites have at least twice as many blacks living in poverty. https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf (page 13.) Growing up poor I never once thought, hmmm, let’s not try to compete in sports because my ‘white privilege’ will enable me to be a doctor, engineer, or lawyer at a disproportionate rate. And it’s reasonable to believe that with twice as many whites in poverty there’d be at least an equal number if not twice as many in aggregate that were using sport to escape poverty.
And this poverty thing is sort of funny if you think about with regards to excelling in sports. At least in track and swimming it helps to have a lot of quality food to build the muscle you need to compete at a high level. The fact that we have poor kids who can jump 30 inches in jr high school and dunk a basketball when adults who have weight trained might be able to grab the rim ought to illustrate that not all bodies are equal.
And if a white guy is 6’6" and has the body of Michael Jordan you think they wouldn’t even attempt basketball? Basketball is a good example because in the USA it’s pretty easy to find a hoop. And if you have height and a bit of fitness coaches will probably approach you.
I grew up with a lot of guys who were good enough to make a run at the NHL. Several of them made it and had pretty good careers. Some got injured and never made it out of college. Others dropped hockey, got their degrees and now live happy, upper middle class lives. They had the option as our school system prepared them for a good college.
One got an Ivy degree, had a long career in the NHL, got his MBA during the summers and had the best of both worlds. 
Still going with culture / social pressures.
Many more white Americans seem to be willing to be that guy from the company’s latex division who is pretty good at softball. Becoming a professional ball player, even with the aptitude for it, is just not considered a legitimate career path for most middle and upper class folks.
Why are people stuck with binary thinking? You think it’s 100% cultural?Don’t you see the similarities to AGW deniers? If man isn’t responsible for 100% then man is responsible for 0%? You don’t think those advocating 0% genetic impact are committing the same fallacy?
Here is a clear example of an advantage in physique for a niche activity. Unless you think we could be Sherpa’s with just the right mindset?The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel And if genes can provide this sort of overwhelming advantage why is it hard to acknowledge that a 0.5% difference in some sport which at the high levels is important might also be provided by some slight genetic difference?
Funny thing about middle and upper class folks, who do you think supply the Olympic athletes in most sports? Ain’t nobody in the 'hood striving for that gold medal in archery. Cite. The sentence preceding the word cite. Another interesting question is lets take American track or American basketball or football, you think that lower class are disproportionately represented in those sports? Wife and mine combined income is in the top 1-2% depending on the year and believe me, if our children show an aptitude towards basketball, soccer, baseball we’ll get them the coaching, power training, and camps needed to maximize the chance of 5-6 years in a pro league. College can wait.
These sort of debates are intriguing because if we throw sex into the discussion the willing suspension of disbelief becomes even higher. You think women can place proportionately to their numbers in the population in practically any sport in the top echelons?
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
Here’s a short excerpt from that article.
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.
You are concerned with success. I am concerned with the reasons a disproportionate number of African American youths choose a sports career in the first place.
It’s clearly not 100% cultural.
However, the cultural component is strong, and the population groups are not genetically distinct, so it’s not possible to say anything very useful about the genetics at this stage, with the exception of a few ethnic groups that are relatively genetically distinct and excel and particular activities.
For the American population, our subgroups are not genetically distinct, so any observable differences must be either cultural, or else due to individual genetic features that can’t be extrapolated to the population as a whole.
octopus writes:
> . . . more whites in poverty than blacks . . .
While there are twice as many whites as blacks in poverty in the U.S., that’s because there are something like seven times as many whites as blacks in the U.S. Poverty is something like three and a half as common among blacks as among whites in the U.S.
More importantly, poor white children with a strong desire to improve their condition are more likely to pursue other avenues that aren’t as low probability. Same for poor Asian children. The cultural narative for black kids escaping poverty emphasises either sports or music to a degree that some see those as the only two paths available.
This whole struggling from poverty may be a red herring regardless. I wonder what the data are for class proportions as related to sports success. I’ll be surprised if the poor actually are disproportionately represented, positively, in the top echelons.
Again you are looking at the “top echelons” while we are saying that potentially top performers in other socioeconomic classes do not consider professional sports as a career. There is a disproportionate number of minority and disadvantaged youths who try out for professional sports while their more privileged peers will keep sports as a hobby.
They cannot become a standout in the field unless they join the field in the first place. The leaders do have the natural talents to rise to greatness but there is no genetic factor that prompted them to choose that job.
Top echelon focus? Yeah because it’s an example of where a discrepancy in the outliers demonstrates a difference in overall distributions even if some of the gross statistical variables are very close. And also because who cares about #1497012709 in an event?
Do we actually know that though? There are many sports where the barrier to entry is high. Gymnastics and tennis for example. I don’t think we see the lower classes proportionally represented in sport like gymnastics, swimming, the shooting sports, lacrosse etc.
So if we kept it at football, baseball, basketball, and track where the facilities are commonly provided by the school or the city in the case of basketball or baseball perhaps the numbers skew more towards the poor. I honestly don’t know. Where I live, the dominant football teams come from the wealthiest portions of the state. The parents in these towns through athletic booster clubs can afford to pay the coach a six figure salary and equip the high schools with near college level weight rooms. They can also afford off season power and strength coaching and year round nutrition designed for gaining muscle weight. Southern football is a big deal. They absolutely wreck the schools that don’t have that sort of money or parental support and involvement. This is all anecdotal but it does provide a data point against the scrappy lower class guy fighting all odds for the big break having a cultural advantage vs those with a ton of money and the desire for vicarious athletic prowess.
And to get to the point of where you can “try out” for a professional sport means you were dominant in high school and/or college. I’m going to do my best to see if I can find any numbers linking socio-economic status with success in football or basketball at the professional level. Now there may very well be in basketball due to the sheer number of black Americans participating in it, but that’s not so easy to say, with accuracy at least, that it is solely due to black American culture.
This is one of these debates that are hard to have and even if a definitive answer were provided what good could come from it? It’s a bit like the existence of free will debate, imo.