Is that a hint of self-doubt I detect? You have no genetic evidence for your genetic explanation. I see no reason to believe your explanation without such evidence.
Let’s look at the NBA for a “coincidence” example.
The NBA is over-represented by blacks, (and to a lesser extent, eastern europeans?)
One possibility is coincidence. Unlikely, in my opinion, since it is a highly valued career that would not typically be discarded for any individual until their potential is overshadowed by the next individual over. That is, very few people drop out of basketball until they are no longer competitive. At the same time, almost every kid starts out playing basketball, and if we look across the US, we see schoolchildren from first grade on exposed to it.
What about other nurturing influences? Family stability. Facilities. Time to pursue a dream instead of scrabble for a living. Training. Coaches. Options to do whatever you want instead of what you have to do. Social pressures such as drug use, drug violence and even imprisonment. Peer support. Against all of those odds, the NBA is overwhelmingly over-represented for basketball by the SIRE group of “black” and the simplest explanation for me is that the SIRE group of “black” contains a prevalence for the genes driving that skillset that is higher than the prevalence of genes for that skillset in white SIRE groups.
I don’t know what that gene is. Perhaps it was present in west africans brought here during the slave trade. I don’t think lumping all the african lines into a SIRE group of “black” means any given african ancestry is going to dominate the basketball court. I doubt the Bayaka people will be taking their turn in the NBA.
I don’t care if the SIRE group of black is a “race.”
But I do think a self-assignment to “black” in the United States correlates with a higher prevalence that you received better basketball genes than if you self-assigned to “white.” As a consequence of that prevalence difference for genes, the average success of the SIRE group of black is higher in the NBA (and, of course, to basketball pursuits all along the way to the NBA) than the average success of the SIRE group of white.
Do you have any idea (or any data on) how much time schoolchildren from different ethnic backgrounds each spend playing various sports, or are you just guessing?
I doubt you believe it’s a single gene, but it’s nice that you acknowledge that there’s no actual evidence for your conclusion.
I wonder how much time Bayaka children spend playing basketball, and how many courts there are in the places they grow up?
It’s probably true that a self-assignment to “black” means one plays basketball more often then some other self-assignment, but there’s no evidence that it has anything to do with genetics. Is it genetic that Russians and Canadians are over-represented in professional hockey, or are there other reasons?
which you have no idea if it actually has anything to do with basketball
And vice versa for hockey, golf, tennis, etc. I think it’s likely that great athletes, like Allen Iverson (when he was younger), Brian Urlacher, Adrian Peterson, etc, would have achieved greatness at any sport had they grown up with it- Iverson would have been a champion middle-weight boxer had he grown up boxing, Adrian Peterson or Ray Lewis would have been an awesome hockey enforcer had they grown up with it, Robert Griffin III could have been a tennis champion, etc- but for non-genetic reasons, they grew up playing basketball and/or football. You acknowledge that there’s no evidence for any particular genetic affinity for certain sports- and with the obvious influences of culture and media, I see no reason to believe in your genetic explanation.
Over the years I have moved along a spectrum of increasing confidence that I am correct on this issue.
Most of the difficulty I have is addressing the nuances and not the basics, when talking with people who have a knee-jerk reaction that anyone who postulates genetic differences as a driver for average outcome differences among SIRE groups has some sort of nefarious or hidden agenda.
But each year seems to bring us closer to a more concrete understanding of exactly which genes drive neurobiology and physiology, and so far my confidence has increased rather than diminished.
Unlike Honesty who thinks “every human has the same set of genes,” I think the opposite. So when I see a study that individuals homozygous for C-for-T substitution in HMGA2 have a 2.5% IQ and brain size difference over those homozygous for no C, I consider us that much closer to identifying some of the exact genes. And that, in turn, is only a step away from describing the prevalences of those genes.
So I guess I’d say I don’t have absolute confidence. And of course, the nuances of populations–whether to split or lump–will never go away.
But with each passing year that performance gaps don’t close despite the best efforts to normalize nurture, I am more comfortable with a non-creationist, non-egalitarian position for gene distribution among populations. Given that genes are disparately distributed, and that evolution drives advantageous mutation, it seems far more likely than not that some populations are genetically advantaged for some skillsets.
I believe that in the end, we’ll all get over that. No one really rises to the bait if some twit says, “men are stronger than women because of genes.” The only dilemma for SIRE differences is how to handle social policy if we insist on self-identifying with groups that have differences for the prevalence of certain genes. Our options will be to stop self-idenitfying (probably a good idea, but perhaps not so easy), or to create policies (race-based AA) that smooth out the difference for SIRE group representation.
Just a nitpick to inject some humor:
Umm…the Bayaka (Aka) are pygmies. I think you could have an intensive UN program to bring them up to speed and they’d still get trumped in NBA tryouts.
I’m trying to help out your (and others’) point that “black” is not a very distinct “race.” The Aka are haplotype L1 and their population diverged a long, long time ago.
Then you basically agree with my point here- the fact that, say, Samoans or Cubans (or any other non-tiny-people ethnic group) might have a lower representation per capita in the NBA then black Americans probably says little about genetics, and more about sports culture.
Samoans are over represented as football linemen because of their size.
Whether this is true or not (why they’re over-represented- I recognize that there are a lot of Samoans in the NFL) says nothing about Samoan genetic tendency towards basketball. Yet it’s my contention that, if most Samoan kids started to play a lot of basketball, then we’d start to see a significantly higher proportion of Samoans in the NBA- and that this would say nothing about genetics, and a lot about sports culture and what kids do in their free time.
Great article on this: Advanced Football Analytics (formerly Advanced NFL Stats): Football Island
Highlights:
Science doesn’t do easy. It also doesn’t care about your sensitivities. If race has any biological merit, it is scientific.
But the fact is that it has absolutely no scientific merit whatsoever. The fact that , in three years, you have never been able to give us an objective definition of race rather proves that fact.
:rolleyes:
For the sake of any lurkers, let me take you through this again step by step:
Science is the study of objective reality.
Therefore science requires an objective subject and/or objective standards of evaluation.
If a subject can not be objectively defined or objectively evaluated, then it is not a scientific category.
You are unable to objectively define or objectively evaluate what race someone belongs to. Therefore your races do not have any scientific validity.
Your non-scientific, purely subjective “Self Identified Race” is not a scientific classification. It is a subjective, social classification.
As we have established in previous threads, I can do a genetic evaluation of *any *surrogate for geographic origin, such as what political party people voted for at the last election or what their favourite TV show is, and get a genetic correlation to that surrogate.
That doesn’t mean that voting trends or TV viewing habits are caused genetic, nor that party support or TV viewing habits are a scientific classification.
You have conceded all this before, but you still keep pushing the same old garbage.
The simple fact is that I can do a scientific *evaluation * based upon any subjective, social category: political affiliation, TV viewing habits, clothing styles or even religion. And I can find genetic correlation with *all *of those things.
But that does not mean that religion, fashion and politics are scientific classifications. But according to your argument, “Black Muslim” or “Watches Mmubai News at 6” are scientifically valid taxa, because they have some correlation to genetics.
Absolute piffle, as all the lurkers in these threads invariably discover.
Um… No, I guess I don’t see it. I honestly believe that what you said that I said is not what I said. (But, come to think of it, I also honestly believe that Hopi don’t look like any other ethnic group.)
I’ll drop out of this thread, as it doesn’t seem to be something I an contribute anything to. Thank you for trying, and especially thank you for being polite.
So I guess species don’t exist because they don’t have a clear, objective standard. From Wiki:
Is there a precise marker that can be used to unambiguously differentiate Darwin’s Finches?
“Race” as it has been used historically is not a good way to classify populations, but populations with different frequency of occurrence traits nonetheless exist regardless of what terms you use to describe them.
Seriously? Show me where I said that tall people never have short kids. Point to the quote. I’ll wait.
As it turns out, science has deep sensitivities about the relationship between genes and population differences.
You might begin by educating yourself about Bruce Lahn’s change in career research plan following his eager announcement about the prevalence of MCPH1 and the scientific community’s reaction to that. The private internal reaction was never published, so you might have to take Bruce aside to get that.
Then you might consider the sensitivity around genetic neurobiological research or perhaps any number of papers, symposiums and presentations around the “ethical” dilemmas facing the population geneticist.
This idea that pure research happens in a political and social vacuum is naive. And of course, the only reason any “ethical” considerations arise in the first place for studying the genetic differences among populations is that populations are different genetically. If the research all pointed to support of an egalitarian hypothesis that we are all equal, it would go full steam ahead without any need for “ethical” considerations at all.
Try here to begin your education on the sensitivities involved. From the paper:
“And yet it is indecorous to accord such differences more
than passing attention in casual conversation, because
they seemingly (but wrongly) imply a trait-like quality
— that differences in behaviour not only exist but reflect
inherent differences that are independent of context and
impervious to change.Conceptions of mental ability
have far-reaching implications for theories of human
nature. In turn, the implications for society are
nothing short of “incendiary…
We consider in detail a practical concern about a
highly polarized research topic. Is it ever ethical to assess
population-group (racial or ethnic) differences in intelligence…
Although the topic of race differences is
only a minor area within the field of intelligence
research, it has had a disproportionately large (and
strongly negative) impact on the public perception of
intelligence research…
Many scientists find
the question of group differences in intelligence to be
distasteful to contemplate, let alone investigate — we are
among them…
In light of such unresolved ethical issues, many
neuroscientists have been reluctant to investigate
individual or group differences in intelligence. Few
scientists investigate race differences in intelligence;
those who do are overwhelmingly white.”
Here:
You said that intelligence was different from height and in the same paragraph asserted that intelligence varies a lot within families. Thus it’s reasonable to infer that you were implying that height does NOT vary a lot within families.
If somebody says “X is different from Y. X has quality Z,” it’s reasonable to infer that the person is implying that Y does NOT have quality Z.
ETA: Also, please answer my questions from before:
-
Please show me your evidence or argument in support of your claim that height is far more easily traced “as a hereditary thing.”
-
Do you have any evidence at all to support your “books in the house” hypothesis?
-
If your hypothesis is correct, why has nobody “closed the gap” through the simple expedient of buying books and sending them to black people?
- I’m skeptical of this too. Can you summarize the results of the tests you speak of and give me links? TIA
Your reasoning is incorrect. I said that intelligence was more polygenetic than height. It is logically invalid to conclude from this that height is not polygenetic.
You leaped to the incorrect conclusion, and you misattributed an opinion to me.
So what? I did not conclude that you were saying that height was not polygenetic.
You were saying that height and intelligence were different. Agreed?
In the same paragraph, you made a statement about variability of intelligence within families. Agreed?
Let me ask you this:
If somebody says “X is different from Y. X has quality Z,” is it reasonable to infer that the person is implying that Y does NOT have quality Z?
I reached a reasonable conclusion.
Also, please answer my questions from before:
-
Please show me your evidence or argument in support of your claim that height is far more easily traced “as a hereditary thing.”
-
Do you have any evidence at all to support your “books in the house” hypothesis?
-
If your hypothesis is correct, why has nobody “closed the gap” through the simple expedient of buying books and sending them to black people?
- I’m skeptical of this too. Can you summarize the results of the tests you speak of and give me links? TIA
It may be used, but that doesn’t mean it is a fact!
I know the Indian man personally and his ancestors as far as he can go back were born and raised in India at least that is what he told me, plus there are many of his culture that are black(and truly blacker than a lot of Africans shown on TV.
So you dispute that there is a relationship between “race” as that word is commonly used and skin color?