Per the article below the hypothesis discussed in the article seems like a perfectly reasonable and sufficiently powerful explanation to the whole black/white performance gap question.
Any reason why this is would not settle the matter for running and swimming differentials?
Can a black-white performance gap be hereditary but not racial?
I think it makes a lot of sense, actually. I’d expect populations from cooler climes (i.e. Europeans) to have stockier limbs relative to their torsos, to minimize heat loss through extremities. The converse would be true in populations from hotter climates. This is a case of environmental pressures selecting for certain phenotypes that are ultimately encoded by genes.
It’s weird that the seeming impetus for this analysis was picking apart racial differences, though. I hinted at this in that other thread: independent of race, what do we see with respect to differences in, say, top swimmers? Does Michael Phelps and other Olympic record-setters have lower centers of gravity relative to their opponents? If center of gravity (as indicated by navel position and limb size, etc.) is independently associated with athletic performance, seems like this would be the case. Isn’t it surprising that in the year 2010, we’re just getting around to realizing this? That’s the main head-scratching thing about this study to me.
All this without invoking differences in mitochondrial efficiency.
This is blatantly wrong!
These facts are obviously made up by neocons.
As far as Im concerned, all of humanity (no matter were you live) is EXACTLY the same, there is no such thing as different gene frequency in different populations. And if you do believe so you are nothing but a nazi.
Youre arguments are embarrassing! We are all the same, exactly the same, it couldnt possibly be a difference between an aborigine in Australia and an indian from south america. What a joke
Take your propaganda and shove it sonny!
Check mate
I appreciate that you were probably trying to be funny, scammy, but the effort just doesn’t gel.
In order for satire to be successful, you have to lampoon the position of someone else in a witty manner. You failed on both accounts, considering nobody around here makes the claim that everyone is exactly the same.
Of course, this still doesn’t imply that there are significant differences between the “races”, as they’re usually construed. For instance, the statement that “blacks have a higher center of gravity” is absolutely ludicrous if you don’t first exclude the Pygmies.
What this is actually saying is that some populations of people have significantly higher centers of gravity, and that those populations happen to be a subset of the broad collection of populations popularly called “black”. But then, if you take almost any human trait, and look at the population which has the most extreme values of that trait, you’ll almost always find that it’s a subset of “black”, simply because the genetic diversity of African populations is far greater than that of the rest of the world combined.
I know there was a black member of one of the USA gold-medal relay teams that was black, and in the last Olympics there was a black medal winner (IIRC), but before that I can’t think of one. I challenge the assertion that there are fewer black swimming elites than in the past.
On top of that, When was the last white 400M winner before Jeremy Wariner? How about 110M hurdles before the Chinese guy? Unless you go back to pre-1960’s Olympics, when were there more non-black elites?
Interesting. After all the tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of SDMB posts over the past 11 years re the whole black/white difference in athletic performance issue here is what appears to be fairly definitive answer to the topic, and there are a total of 7 posts.
So, is the issue of black/white athletic performance differentials effectively put to bed at this point?
No.
Like you said it is interesting. And as presented, as a speculative hypothesis of a possible contributing factor, is completely uncontroversial. Like you said, it makes some sense but there are some basic bits of corroborating information that are as of yet missing, such as “do elite swimmers actually have a lower than average center of gravity?” Eyeballing them, I think not. But I do not know.
Settling “the issue of black/white athletic performance differentials”? Nah. Not even close.
Well, it’s just not that shocking a revelation. It’s easy to grasp that certain minor anatomical variations can give an advantage in certain sports, and if one racial group has 5% of its population with these traits and another has 1% of its population with these traits, and you have a rigorous selection process to rapidly narrow the field to the elite level, the first group will probably have more representation.
I’m mildly curious if anyone has done studies of elite runners and elite swimmers to see how much physical variation there is among them, i.e. are we reaching a point where there is an optimal runner’s or swimmer’s body and the racial group most represented is the one whose genetics increase the odds of producing that body?
In any case, looking at a few dozen athletes who represent the top 1% of 1% of 1% and generalizing from them about whole racial groups is foolish. If I was going to try it, I wouldn’t pick athletes, anyway, but members of elite special-forces military units, who have to operate in fields that are far less controlled and predictable than sporting events, and who have to be quick-witted and creative.
After all, it’s comparing “I have to run a hundred meters in a straight line as fast as I can and beat the guy running next to me by a hundredth of a second” to “I have to run through this bombed-out warehouse to reach my objective, and the guy next to me isn’t just running alongside, but shooting at me, so defeating him means shooting back.”
Pseudoscience. Worst than bad science, because it fools reporters into thinking it has meaning. If they had produced a paper detailing the differences in various body measurements across different ethnic groups, or even across different racial groups (however they want to define that) they might have a scientific paper. When they make the leap to assuming that the measurements they discuss have the effect they claim, by “Using equations about the physics of locomotion” no less, they lose their credibility. And when they then take another leap and try to generalize to all the population they are really reaching. Like a number of people pointed out, using a tiny elite population to represent a general group is not good science.
And if you want to know why the all the elite swimmers in the world are white, all you have to do is go to a swim meet. ALL of the participants are white, for whatever reason.
In the end I have to question the motives of people who waste their time on such studies. Do they want to prove that us white folks should stick to swimming and yachting and leave running to black people? Do they want separate white and black sports leagues? Even if everything they claim is 100% true, what is its use?
Absolutely not. This paper is an embarrassment to good science, and a mockery of intellectual rigor. As Chronos alludes to, this paper doesn’t even define the races they claim to find differences among. There is no citation given for statements like “More and more, the world finalists in sprint are black and in swimming are white.” except for a table of Olympic gold medalists who have been assigned a race. There is no citation, reasoning, or explanation given for those assignments.
If they want to convince me that one ‘race’ is better at swimming than another, they first have to convince me that there are races among the human species.
I don’t understand how this shit survives in the age of DNA.
Whether from the USA or the Caribbean islands, the athletes are - to varying degrees - mixed race, almost always the product of slavery, often rape.
Sure you can still say they’re primarily of “West African origin” but they’re partly of European origin.
If West Africans are uniquely fast, where are those nations represented in the rankings?
I dunno if I buy it. A higher center of gravity would be a detriment in sports that required quick change of direction. Like basketball.
That’s what I was thinking as well, after more reflection. It could also pose a problem in some football positions. Does this mean whites are better linebackers? What about boxers and wrestlers?
After reading the actual paper (and not the Slate article), I’m bothered that the authors have sidestepped the most obvious questions in their emphasis on predicting the future. In all their lists of record-setting sprinters, wouldn’t it make much more sense to mention the athlete’s dimensions that are pertinent to L1 rather than stating “black” or “white”? Because if what they are positing is true, that the evolution of the sport selects for a higher center of gravity, then L1 of finalists should be increasing with time, irrespective of race. They’re asking us to take it on faith that the black sprinters have higher centers of gravity than the elite white runners who came before them, all because of averages taken from a more general and variable population. But it could very well be that their centers of gravity are not hugely different than the white runners, and there is some other factor that separates them (longer hours of training, greater heat tolerance, more lung capacity, larger feet, better shoes, etc).
The authors put so much emphasis on how “more and more” the elite sprinters are black and elite swimmers are white, as if this is even relevant to their hypothesis. It’s curious that they do this, when this emphasis actually suggests in a roundable way that environment has a lot to do with what we’re seeing, not just biology. If blacks have a natural advantage in sprinting, why were whites ever winning to the extent that they were? Sprinting should have always been dominated by blacks, if biology is the answer. Barriers to access and sociocultural factors are likely reasons why black finalists were rarities back in the day. “More and more” elite sprinters today are black because “more and more” blacks are competing, duh. If proportionately less and less whites are competing, well then there you go. We’re back to square 1.
If I were a reviewer on this paper, this would probably be my critique.
I read the new Freakonomics book the other day and it said that athletes born nearer the cutoff date for junior sports team makes a huge difference. For example, if the cutoff for age 11 soccer is August 1, then kids born on August 2 have an additional year of physical development over kids born July 31.
In the US, sports teams are often by the grade you are in school. I wonder if there is any difference in the average age of blacks and whites in school in a particular grade? Any small differences would be magnified by circular, cumulative causation.
This, emphatically.
Damn Howard University and their racist studies.
Let’s start with the easy question: How do we define “race” for this?
The answer is Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity (SIRE) groups.
As humans, we tend to be lumpers. Call it social or cultural (or even find a biologic underpinning for tribalism), but we ascribe to ourselves membership in various groups. In the case of race, we lump blacks, whites, Latinos, Inuit, Han, Khoisan…on and on willy-nilly into all these assorted very loose and very irregular categories, some of which are almost purely cultural, many of which are reasonably tight populations biologically and many others which are very loose biologically.
Here’s the dilemma: given any two SIRE groups, when we find patterns of average performance differences, we can often show genetically-based underpinnings for those differences. It really is as simple as that: there are prevalence differences for genes coding for performance differences that vary among SIRE categories, even at the level of “black” and “white.”
“Races” differ in average potential because they contain populations which skew the average for the race. The extent to which any given individual is representative for that average depends on a wide variety of factors, including that individual’s nurturing opportunity, but at a lumping level, SIRE groups have average differences that reflect differences in the prevalence of genes.
The language used in academia to present this simple concept is very carefully structured, dancing around a very hot coal of racism and a long and sordid history of abusing both the concept and the lumped groups.
The answer to this question: “Can a black-white performance gap be hereditary but not racial?” is that black-white average performance gaps can be genetically-based. Whether or not they are “racial” is a definitional question, and it takes a bit of fancy linguistic footwork to suggest they are not “racial” because races do not exist as a reasonable construct. That is true if you are a splitter, but does not take away from the simpler truth: black-white performance differences can be a result of differences in prevalence for genes coding for a given skillset at the cohort level of people who describe themselves as belonging to one group or another.