What explains the big discrepancy between white American players and foreign born white players? Where are the white Americans players who are as good as Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, Gasol, et al? Probably not genetics.
So why do white people dominate tennis? The top tennis stars make as much money as any athlete, just about. I think white people dominate tennis for cultural, not genetic reasons. I think white people dominate hockey for cultural and not genetic reasons. I think hispanic and Asian fighters dominate boxing right now for cultural and not genetic reasons. Great athletes are great athletes- if Roger Federer had grown up in the US, playing football or basketball, I have little doubt that he’d be a great NFL or NBA player. If Allen Iverson had grown up in Europe playing tennis, I have little doubt he’d be a great pro tennis player.
Epigenetics. Neural plasticity. Yes, and there’s probably more where that came from.
The working of both genes and the human brain are complex, and we’re learning more and more over time. That’s why I’m skeptical of CP’s rush to conclusions without adequate data. There’s more going on here than we fully understand.
Why pretend to have all the answers?
We have been over this, but perhaps you have forgotten.
The reasona basketball is a better example is the relative ratios of the starting pools with the ultimate pools.
I am not aware that tennis has a large starting pool of black players; likely not even one proportionate with the relative percentages of blacks and whites. I agree those differences are cultural, and not that hard to account for.
On the other hand, from elementary school on, both black and white children are exposed to basketball, and the starting pool of white kids is much larger than the starting pool of black kids.
I don’t discount cultural or social reasons for why a given group dominates a sport. Heck; there was a Hebrew league in the first half of the previous century dominated by (gasp!) Jews (although even then when they did play the black leagues they did not fare particularly well). But once basketball was opened up to all comers, and opportunity was normalized, blacks won the day.
I believe the reason there isn’t a larger starting pool for blacks for tennis or ice hockey is cultural and/or situational. If there were an equivalent starting pool, perhaps we could try to normalize for nurturing and make a conclusion about a genetic basis for the skillsets there…
Maybe the good white US players preferred drifting off to sell insurance instead of pursuing their NBA dreams? Maybe they were just lazier at practicing for cultural reasons?
Skills like those for basketball can’t possibly be genetic, I realize. 
We just have to keep looking until we find the non-genetic explanations. Where we see disproportionate representation of populations, and equivalent opportunity, let’s not let that dissuade us from the primary goal of insisting it cannot be a genetic advantage. No sirree, bob. Not gonna open that door.
You really don’t know how to follow the points one makes.
That was granted and you only remark on what was already mentioned, pathetic. The point was that indeed there is no genetic evidence, and once again, not very likely to make much of a difference as the medical example of racial medicine showed, even the moral aspects (something that is already mentioned many times that still makes moot all your efforts so far) are not going to be dismissed by the scientists you are quoting, indeed, the whole of your efforts are moot and useless for the experts that are looked at by you do not even follow your ideas.
No on has argued this.
God you whine a lot. Yes, we’re asking for actual genetic evidence before accepting your genetic explanation. Quit whining about it.
We are agreed, I think, that what is not environmental is genetic.
I hold that the reasonable environmental explanations fail. That failure is evidence that genes create the residual gap.
It is acceptable for you to complain that I have too cavalierly discarded sound environmental explanations. We can take a look at your putative explanations and see how they hold up.
It is a failure of comprehension on your part to accept that, if environmental influences are normalized, then the difference is genes.
Suppose that, in 1950, I wanted to argue that an academic test score gap for Down syndrome was genetic. I would expose children with Down syndrome to similar nurturing to those without the syndrome, and demonstrate that no amount of nurturing could close the gap (even if better nurturing could narrow the gap). It would be widely accepted that this residual gap is genetic, and no one would be demanding “actual genetic evidence” for the specific gene(s) and/or how it is expressed.
You persist in pretending there is some sort of a priori demand that a gene be identified before there is any evidence that genes are at play. I submit you want to create a special case here for intelligence because it is a socially and politically sensitive topic, and not because science demands that genes be identified in order to make a presumptive case for genes and not nurture. You are conflating the concept of “absolute proof” with “evidence.”
You are either confused, or indulging yourself in a rhetorical wave of the hand which uses word play (“no genetic evidence”) to create an incorrect inference (“no evidence that genes cause a difference”). The first quote is technically correct in a very narrow sense: we have not yet identified specific genes and mechanisms. The second quote is totally wrong.
You are correct that I have trouble following your points.
As to the article by Hawks, I think the tenor of the article is to tread carefully when it comes to assuming there are not genetic differences among populations. His concern is driven by Hilary Clinton’s statement about how we are 99.9 % “the same” and he expands on this concern. First, the difference is not necessarily trivial, since the 99.9% sameness does not necessarily mean that there are no important genes which are different. Second, " …what happens tomorrow when scientists find some really important genetic difference?"
You seem to take it on faith that there are no important differences in source populations which are driven by genes. I do not. Nor do I think population and evolutionary biologists, nor geneticists, make that assumption. They may take a (public, at least) position that no important differences have been specified yet, but they do not typically take a position that no important differences are likely to ever be identified among source populations.
So, are you claiming that foreign born white players are genetically superior to US white players, or did you miss the point entirely?
You’re awesome, doubleminus. Unfortunately, I posted about epigenetics in regards to suicide victims, depression, and even environmental-induced obesity in WW2 babies from Holland (“Dutch Winter” of 1944) in this thread. It gets dodged by the peanut gallery here, mainly because they’re unable to grasp that “nurturing” is not a nebulous concept but has a real, biological correlate. You’ll ever be able to convince the high school graduates here of this, though, as their knowledge of biology begins at the birth of the eugenics of movement and stops abruptly at 1999. And it shows. Like T.I emphatically rapped, “we’re the Jetson’s and they’re the Flintstones.” Yabba dabba doo.
- Honesty
And here is the demonstration to all what is the basic straw man again of the whole discussion, besides the conspiracy theory.
Of course you still ignore that geneticists report that while evidence has been found to identify genes for specific diseases and conditions, the evidence also reports that as for differences in intelligence there is no evidence or a moot point, as the medical data reports it was really dumb to assume differences like skin color could be used to exclude whites and others from the benefits of a medicine. There is no faith involved, the lack of evidence has been reported many times and once again, experts and science are so along that path psychologists are even researching people like you for continuing to be wrong with fallacies like yours.
Someday, like Elmer Fudd, you will find that the ground is gone from your feet. And experts removed it a few decades ago from the ones that try to get science to support their prejudices.
Thanks.
I must have missed your post. This is such a long thread…
I vividly remember the “Dutch Winter” documentary, that was a terrible time in Holland.
Nowitzki is the only NBA player from a country of 80 million people (Chris Kaman is a German-American NBA player who acquired German citizenship to play in the Olympics, US born, didn’t speak any German). There are currently 8 Canadian players in the NBA, of whom Nash is the only one without visible African heritage. Spain does have five NBA players of whom only one (Serge Ibaka) is of African heritage.
But all in all, back to the drawing board on your point, I think. Saying that people of African descent aren’t over represented among those with far above average physiques for sports like basketball and many aspects of track and field, is denying the obvious. Denying the obvious doesn’t help one’s credibility in debating things which are less obvious.
Note that the usual debate about academics is different in that it usually focuses on averages, not on academic abilities as far above the mean as NBA or Olympic class athletic talent. Differences in averages are almost inherently less dramatic and attributing causes is more difficult. But to take an example at least somewhat more comparable to the NBA case, in 2004 3.1% of whites scored above 170 on the LSAT (law graduate school exam), .3% of blacks. Going further up you reach points on most such tests where still on the order of 1% of whites have scored but no blacks may have scored, nationally, in any given year. A more extremely skewed representation is seen in the top echelons of math and physics (people in the top 0.00…1%) where people of African descent are almost unknown.
Coming up with hokey social/behavioral theories for such discrepancies is not convincing anyone who doesn’t already believe, as a matter of secular faith, that ‘all people created equal’ means that in a totally fair and color blind world people of all colors would be exactly equally represented at every level of every human endeavor. But who says? And it’s a pretty self evidently wrong idea of the variations in human kind, especially when you look at the extremes. It’s not a comfortable topic in polite society, but it’s ridiculous to try to explain it Away with theories such as that white boys want to someday be big shots on Wall Street so they aren’t as interested in swimming through waves of p*ssy as teenage basketball phenoms, so they don’t work as hard at it…yeah right :rolleyes:.
Does this mean that the U.S baskbetball team is undefeated in the Olympics? Or did a team of white people beat them?
The definitions we seem to be using are that “environmental” covers every possible thing that is not genetic- so, yes. Evidently.
Based on the above definition, then if “environmental” influences normalized, then the only thing left is genetics. But I don’t believe “environment” (or everything other than genetics) have been normalized- not even close.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. You haven’t followed the thread, and you’re not familiar with the evidence. You also seem to have a reading comprehension problem.
I specifically asked, what explains the big discrepancy between good foreign born white NBA players, and the white American players who are on the whole, much weaker. Is it genetics? If not, then what? Now you’re wasting pixels answering a question I didn’t ask.
Way up thread, I linked to some of Ron Unz’ examination of worldwide IQ test data, where there were large discrepancies in IQ test scores between the Irish and the English, and between different European peoples and their countrymen who had emigrated to the US. Unz believes, and I agree, that genetics can’t explain these test score gaps because the populations in question are almost identical, genetically.
The fundamental problem with the genetic hypothesis is that it falls apart under close scrutiny. A sound scientific hypothesis doesn’t do that. It withstands deeper examination.
If you want to prove your claim, bring the evidence. Don’t make excuses about it being too hard, or taking too long. Since you don’t have the evidence, and aren’t likely to get it anytime soon, the question remains open.
** Corry El,**
I know these articles are above your head, but they do dig into the fundamental problems with the genetic hypothesis:
Foreign Dispatches: Brain Evolution, Population Genetics and Armchair Kookery - I
I remember reading quite recently a survey of results in the heritabiliy of cognition, claiming that it is commonly agreed that about 70% of the IQ variability is inherited. Does this make sense? Any implication on the debate at hand?
? You are evidently not meaning the same thing by “Flynn effect” that I’m referring to. I was talking about the phenomenon of IQ scores rising over several decades in different societies, not with respect to intra-society racial differences.
For example, the Flynn effect of rising IQ scores over time has been observed even in societies that have comparatively very little racial diversity, such as Scotland (overwhelmingly white) or Japan (overwhelmingly East Asian).
This has nothing to do with black/white test score differences: this has to do with the fact that IQ test scores even within a population overwhelmingly dominated by a single racial group are observed to rise at a rate that can’t plausibly be accounted for by genetic change in the population over time.
In other words, we’ve got an IQ test score phenomenon that can’t be due to genetic factors but is not yet adequately understood or explained in terms of non-genetic factors. That pretty much makes nonsense of any confident claims that we currently have enough “reasonable control” of non-genetic factors in IQ testing to be able to reliably separate genetic and non-genetic effects.