All American whites have equivalent opportunity and desire? Plus the existence of American whites getting beat in the face in MMA means many do choose that path.
I don’t know what this means.
So you’re saying there are cultural factors, eh? I agree.
Who doesn’t acknowledge cultural factors? It’s the idea that it’s 100% cultural that I find disingenuous.
Sounds like we agree on the basics, then. Carry on.
The odds of an excellent black student getting into higher education and getting a good job are far superior to the odds of a black student getting into the NBA, and particularly so given the active effort to enroll good black students.
This idea that black kids play basketball because that is the only path of success open to them is horseshit.
Wow, disingenuous. Do you hold his opinion because you have spent a great deal of time looking into the genetics of biologically arbitrary groups like White and African American, or perhaps better defined groups like Pygmy and Eskimo and found enough genetic differences between these two populations that affect the transcription, translation, protein life-cycle and function of athleticism genes that the only conclusion you can hold is that somebody such as myself is disingenuous? Because what I find from the genetics angle is a lot of unreplicated findings regarding socially-defined groups’ differences in performance on this or that measure, but from the cultural/environment angle a lot of findings that are replicated in a variety of ways. Perhaps I am too disingenuous to be able to read and analyze the information in the proper light though.
What’s with the jibber jabber? Yes, I find it disingenuous and typically in service of a political agenda for educated people to make the claim that human physical traits have no role in sports outcomes. Do you think Pygmies will ever beat Jamaicans in a 100m Olympic race? Biology has an impact. Culture does as well. And of course that’s not even getting into the impact that biology may have an culture.
Do we or do we not live in a universe in which physical laws apply to humans? Or is there something supernatural that allows Homo Sapiens to transcend physics?
Clearly 100% culture. If only some other part of the world had people who liked to run.:rolleyes:
But the problem is no person has said that afaict. Of course human physical traits have a huge role in sports outcomes. The issues with your perspective are three-fold:
- You insist on using broad phenotypic groups to as proxies for average genetic differences between very specific groups
- The minuscule number of professional athletes means even average differences between groups are often minimized
- Genetic difference cannot explain the wide demographic swings in professional athletics
Let’s take these point by point. The first issue is that your side keeps saying things like ,“Black people are better athletes”, when the actual, more supportable, claim is often something very specific like a well defined group in Kenya tending to disproportionately produce elite distance runners. The latter is defensible while the former is largely nonsense. Of course when you drill down on a very specific group, you can see physical traits that are common that might confer some benefit or detriment in a given activity (eg. Pygmies being weaker basketball players on average). Saying something like that is closer to arguing that male Manning family members are really good football players. The above is justifiable, but the less specific you get, for example, by branching out from a family, to tall White guys, the more baseless the claim becomes.
Two, when we look at he professional leagues around the world, we are largely drawing the top .001% of people. Even if you wanted to argue that the rough genetic profile that might make one a great basketball player, for example, was 3 times as common in African Americans as it is in White Americans, there are so many more White people that it would not explain the differences in the makeup of the NBA. Further, the more we look at individual genetic profiles, we see most African Americans have mixed ancestry. We also see that no clear trend towards having more African ancestry than European ancestry as being a factor in athleticism. Clearly, Aficans are not dominating the NBA.
Three, even when we limit the scope of investigation to mature sports that are highly remunerative or publicized, we can identify wild swings in ethnic, religious, racial, or national overrepresentation over the decades. Just to mention a few:
- Yugoslavians/Servs/Croatians overrepresentation in the NBA in the mid 80s to 90s
- African-Americans representation in baseball increasing after integration than plummeting in recent years
- The Chinese ascendency in Olympic sports (nearly) across the board
- Dominican overrepresentation in baseball currently
- Iranian dominance in weight lifting and wrestling
- Dutch and English dominance in soccer in decades past
- Americans men used to dominate tennis
- Jockeys used to be disproportionately Black
Genes don’t change that fast, so the proximate cause must be something else. Doesn’t mean that genes aren’t informing the results, but rather that they are not the decisive factor in the majority of cases we see when looking at such a elite group. Especially when you notice countries like Canada or Russia dominating a sport like hockey when there is very little genetic similarities between the two groups. It’s also why even within the professional ranks, physical gifts are not usually what desperate the best from the merely good.
If genes alone made up the bulk of why some groups excel at a given activity, you would also see patterns that typically don’t exist. For example, Indians, who are great at cricket, should in theory be better at baseball. And even if you just chalk it up to expisure to a sport as the cause, how do you know what we are seeing today is reflective of physical differences anymore than what we saw 50 years ago was? It was only a few decades ago that Kenyans started dominating distance running. Why do assume the picture you see today is illustrative of broad physical differences?
In short, of course genes matter, but they matter much more in separating the average athlete from a one at a near professional level. There’s tons more people physically gifted enough to play professional sports from a genetic point of view than there are those who earnestly attempt to do so. Even fewer of them actually succeed. Like money in politics, genes matter to a certain point. No money effectively rules you out, but lots of money doesn’t guarantee success. Given that paradigm, it doesn’t really makes sense to argue money is a decisive factor if we are looking that differentiating between elite candidates who all have enough money to reach a high threshold.
I’ve never said genes alone. I’d never even hazard a guess as to what proportion they play. And yes I’m aware that black and white are poor categorizations for this sort of thing. I may have been lazy with my wordings in some posts. My main beef is those who claim there is 0 genetic impact and that each arbitrary sub group has the same distribution of traits. My feeling is that those who advocate no genetic impact do so for political purposes.
Please quote someone saying arguing for zero genetic impact? You seem to addressing a straw man. At best, you see people arguing genetic have little to no role as a determinative factor in who becomes a professional athlete among those who are physical gifted enough to become professional athletes.
Your article says some scientists hold the hypothesis that the shape of the Kenyan’s bodies play a role in their performance. It implies they believe their body shape is innate or genetic. There’s absolutely nothing new about this line of reasoning.
It has a paragraph where a book author and scientists express fear of exploring these ideas. Yet I readily found many articles on the topic in Google scholar. This leaves me confused. Apparently there is some unspoken desire to shut down research on the innate physical characteristics of Kenyan runners but at the same time there are many publications discussing the topic.
Your article goes on to describe how Kalenjin teenagers go through an extremely painful initiation ceremony and implies they spend a lot of time training for this ceremony and this pain tolerance is beneficial to long distance running. Other articles, readily found on Google scholar, describe further environmental differences such as the extent of their habit of running to school. I’m not saying that these two features explain all the difference between the performance of Kalenjin elite runners on the world stage. What I am saying is Kalenjin people develop in an environment that is in many ways thoroughly foreign to what you or I experience.
The reason why it is so difficult to imagine that a person sincerely believes the phenomenon of elite Kalenjin runners and the prevalence of African Americans in American basketball is entirely due to environmental causes is because of how difficult it is to imagine what it is like for a person to grow up in an environment foreign to our own. On the other hand, “genetics” is a concept we feel familiar with and fills in for us what are imagination cannot conceive. It’s cool that this term “genetics”, a science that is still in its fledgling state and works to shape us in a way that is hard to understand is a perfect construct to substitute for our lack of imagination when it comes to understanding something like the difference between Kenyan elite runners and elite runners from other parts of the world.
Group Z is so dominant in this sport while group Y has never had a single representative member - it must be genetics! See that’s so easy! I didn’t understand why the difference in representation exists before saying genetics and I still do not now, but at least I am sure the mysterious difference is due that mystery genetics. Except when we actually study genetics, it does not cooperate according to our imaginations while studying the role of environmental differences (and not just cultural ones) is far more fruitful. So for me at least, it’s not politics that informs my deep suspicion of the notion that genetics plays a role in the dominance of athletes in a sport from one culture versus another. It’s just one argument has been so pathetically unconvincing that I’ve adopted the belief that it really is just culture or some other combination of the environment.
I see absolutely no reason to believe that there is some distinct set of innate traits that are common to one ethnic group and nearly absent in another that it explains the presence/absence of members of these ethnic groups in the elite of a particular sport. I am pretty sure that no matter what the benefit of having X or Y trait on your ability to perform in a sport, every member of the sport’s elite will share that trait.
And by the way, I fully support the notion that genetics plays a role in individual differences in athletic performance. It’s silly to believe otherwise.
How much overlap is there between excellent students, and students trying to make a career out of basketball, though? I can think of some (UK’s Alex Poythress, for example), but they are the exception.
Whether or not your first paragraph is two or not, what do most black kids believe? If they don’t believe it’s true, then this is an entirely reasonable explanation for at least part of the disparity. The same can be true in reverse – if white and Asian kids are a lot less likely to believe they will be champion sprinters or play in the NBA, then they are less likely to make efforts towards that path.
Not considering that these sorts of things might possibly play a role in these disparities is ridiculous.
You all are forgetting one main part of participating in sports growing up and that’s just basic interest.
I grew up in a pretty diverse community with kids of all races and there was always just a stronger interest in basketball and football with black kids than there was with white kids. Heck, my best friend growing up was white and no matter how much I invited him over to my house to play basketball with me, he just wasn’t interested. He’d rather we go golfing or play baseball. Which is understandable, because when you turn on tv that’s the sports you see predominantly white people participating in.
This whole time nobody’s even bought this up. A lot of my other good friends went to private schools that were majority white and they also stated that white kids just weren’t interested in playing basketball and football for the most part. Even when it’s an all white or all black school, tryouts don’t include everybody.
Your strawman writes, Brickbacon!
Common to a group? No. Differences in distribution and quality of outliers? Yes.
And regardless of being adopted into a Sherpa tribe, if the Sherpas altitude tolerance is genetic, the adopted, if they lack that genetic adaptation won’t fare as well on average at altitude.
Football has the interest of whites and blacks. But note the positional disparity based on race. Note that the last starting white cornerback was Jason Sehorn from perhaps a decade or so ago. Why? Don’t tell me playing offensive line is a white cultural thing.
Here are the genetic advantages to blacks I’ve called out in this thread:
Faster; stronger; stronger bones; better armspan/height ratio.
Here are the sports:
NFL. NBA. Sprinting.
There is no chance the overrepresentation of blacks in the US is not signficantly due to average genetic differences. Hell; we’ve actually identified some of them.
That there are assorted nurturing differences for so many sports is not in question. That there are pockets of genetic exceptions among populations is not in question.
Which Croation Spud Webb do want to advance as evidence that genes are not a significant factor here? Which analyst thinks the average Eastern European player plays BB the way the average black NBA player does?
Which Chinese sprinter from a country of 1+ billion constantly scouring the entire nation for talent will be winning the 100/200 meter dash?
Of course culture plays a role, and especially so in all of those more peripheral endeavors, or ones not as directly related to power muscle, strength, armspan and bone density. But no Head Start program for BB and NBA success is going to overcome the genetic advantage of US blacks and get whites back into the Pros with proportional representation.
LOL.
Sigh…did you read the thread?
Anyway…we are interested in what we can excel at.
The idea that whites could excel at BB or Football, but are just not motivated is silly. I do not disagree that they give up earlier, and perhaps especially so in a diverse community. They suck at those sports when juxtaposed with black athletes.
Your absolute certainty is unconvincing (especially when you talk about muscles and strength in response to a post about how Iranians dominate weightlifting!). It’s entirely possible that white and Asian kids are less likely to see a future in basketball or football or sprinting (and more likely to see a future in other careers), and therefore are less likely to focus on these sports, and it’s entirely possible that black kids are less likely to see a future in other careers and more likely to see one in athletics, and thus focus on athletics.
It’s entirely possible that black kids are less likely to see a future in professional hockey or tennis, and so don’t put as much focus on those sports.
All of these things are possible, and may play a role. There’s no reason to believe, based on evidence so far, that African-Americans with more African ancestry are more likely to excel in these sports than African Americans with more European ancestry, and this wouldn’t even be that difficult of a study to do. Without this evidence (or data on all the genes responsible for various types of athletic prowess), it’s not reasonable to conclude with absolute certainty that genetic differences are responsible for these disparities.
So do you believe we could find 200,000 non-Sherpas in the world who can adapt to high altitude as well as Sherpas?