I am pretty sure that there are heritable traits and that things like size, strength and even some portion of IQ are among those traits. It seems silly to me to argue that there is no heritable genetic element to why some races are over represented in some sports.
It seems silly to me to argue that was the proximate cause, or even a large factor, given the wild demographic shifts in the player pool, the disparate opportunities afforded to individuals, the clear lack of overlap between phenotypic features and genetic profiles, and the huge role culture plays in almost everything.
What shifts in demographic pools? Are you seriously struggling to understand why these supposedly genetically advantaged black players didn’t get drafted onto NFL and NBA team until fairly recently? Seriously?
I don’t know if you are saying that most black NBA basketball players or black NFL football players are from the hood or that most of them have had personal trainers all their lives. But blacks from across their economic spectrum are represented in professional sports at much higher levels than their white counterparts from the same socioeconomic strata.
I’m not sure what this means and why it is so clear. Aren’t all the things we are talking about phenotypic features? Or are things like speed by phenotypic?
Sure environment plays a huge role in everything but I don’t think there are any environments in the USA that would affect things like height. I don’t know very many environments in the USA where a natural athlete isn’t going to be able to do something athletic.
You don’t need to do a comparison of Black vs. White athletes, nor do you need to consider times when Blacks were not allowed to play certain sports. As I noted, the percentage of Blacks in MLB has more than halved in 25 years or so. Why? If anything, baseball is a more attractive pursuit given rising salaries and guaranteed contracts. Further, you can look at the complete reversal of the percentages of Jews vs gentiles in basketball in the early to mid 20th century or the dominance of Scandinavian distance runners in the early 20th century (won 28 of 36 possible Olympic medals over 5000 and 10000m). Or look at the dearth of Black rugby, hockey, tennis, and (top) soccer players; all sports which reward speed, and other characteristics of sports dominated by Black athletes. Those trends are not due to group genes, and there are dozens of trends like this that are not weakened by segregation or overt opportunity disparities.
But White and Blacks are still very disparate culturally speaking. It’s not JUST money, opportunity, etc., but also culture.
I am saying “Black” is a broad category that has few solid genetic markers common to all or most people considered Black. To quote one cite, “data from the Human Genome Diversity Project confirms these assertions by showing that inter-individual genetic variation between people in the same sociological racial grouping is much greater than between the averages contrasted across different classifications”. If you are arguing “Black” genes are what makes Kenyan runners and Jamaican sprinters unique, then you are making an attribution error when ascribing it to the skin color rather than their specific, small, cohort and culture. It’s particularly problematic when you look for genetic similarities in a large, heterogeneous group like African-Americans.
“Natural athletes” don’t become professionals all the time.
So just because we have observational measurements that show blacks sprint faster, jump higher, have stronger bones, wider armspan ratios and mature younger, and
…just because we have genetic information that backs up all of that–not to mention things like higher androgen levels in young men–…
the overall picture can be summarized that we just have “a few genes” and “miniscule, really, if compared to the entire human genome” ?
It is a hoot watching you struggle with a determination that you are not a genetic egalitarian, and are instead quite open-minded about the whole genes v nature.
I’m unaware of such undisputed measurements, and considering your posting history, I’m not going to take your word for it at all.
Absolutely. We don’t know much. We certainly don’t know enough to make claims with certainty that just so happen to perfectly match the pseudo-scientific crap peddled by white supremacists.
More “egalitarian” straw man bullshit.
We are talking, first of all (to simplify where we can apply what we know to be physical advantages) NBA and NFL.
It is true that before basketball became such a pinnacle career, those who played it professionally may have come from ranks with fewer other options.
What is not true is that, given its status as a pinnacle career today (fame; fortune; girls) the only ones interested in it are “outsiders.” In point of fact, it is a highly desirable and widely-pursued sport across the board because of all sorts of perks for every stellar athlete of any race along the way. This is true at every middle and high-school in the country, regardless of the race mix in that particular school. And on average, no one who is a basketball star gives it up until they are outcompeted. Even in high school, an extraordinary advantage of (local) fame and girls accrue to basketball stars; even better, fortune accrues in the form of a college scholarship. And of course in college, all of the above await the elites.
What we see is that as the path becomes more competetive, genes win. Those who are outcompeted drop out of the race.
This is not because of bad nurturing of white basketball stars. It isn’t because they want to be car salesmen and lawyers instead of BB stars. It is because they are not, on average, good enough to stay in the BB race. Every nurturing advantage is on the side of the white basketball player, on average: Stable home life; chance to stay in school (required, for team sports); facilities; coaching; less need to work to support a family; less social harassment (drugs; police; bad friends); the list goes on.
But genes win.
This is your opinion, but these are not facts. Do you know how many hours kids from each group play basketball, or other such statistics? Without these numbers, you’re guessing.
Here’s a freebie place to start.
Or you could do your own reading on the thousands upon thousands of published studies.
Or–if you just like pictures, start here for sprinting advantages. LOL
Sure, a link describing a book with uncited claims written by a journalist/athlete. I’ll get right on it.
The many, many studies I’ve written have indicated to me that this issue is far more uncertain than you seem to indicate.
“Genetic study by photographs of people”. LOL.
Would you be surprised if 100% of those sprinters had West African ancestry? Shouldn’t there be at least 1 Asian? Or 1 non black from the ghetto? Or other deprived place where running is the culture?
Would you be surprised that 100% of starting NHL goalies, NFL punters and kickers, and male tennis major winners in the last few decades are White? I don’t get why you keep citing this stat as if it is such a remarkably inexplicable occurance. There are literally dozens of those factoidsbhhhh. Everything from there never having been a Black soccer player named as a FIFA finalist for player of the year, to there not having been a top Black hockey player ever.
Besides, running track is not that popular, and most people who aren’t incentivized to do it aren’t going to try to do it at a high level when they pursue other sports or interests.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they all had some West African ancestry, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they all had some European ancestry as well. In all likelihood, most of them have some proportion of African (various regions), European, and possibly other ancestries.
Apologies if I’m misinterpreting which definition of “factoid” you’re using, but I don’t think any of these claims is accurate.
Foot speed is simple to measure. And you keep forgetting that in a sport that has vast participation, American football, that blacks monopolize the speediest positions. Now if hockey and tennis were as accessible and popular as football and we saw equal participation with vastly unequal results than I’d use those examples as well. You seem to be bothered that it’s blacks that are in a superior situation. Why?
Is it more probable or not that every ethnic group and tribe has the exact same distribution of traits? Every tribe and ethnicity are identical sets?
I don’t see how any of that changes the premise that genetic plays a role in physical and athletic ability or how that athletic ability translates into the dominance of black athletes in certain football positions. Noone is saying that genetics are the ONLY factor at play but in cases where blacks and whites compete on a fairly even playing field, blacks tend to dominate the fast reaction speed positions. In other positions that might require size and strength we see more proportional distribution.
Sure money has a lot to do with it (there is a reason why country club sports are dominated by whites) and culture (there is a reason why there is a vanishingly small number of black men who don’t know who Michael Jordan is), but in many parts of the country, football is equally popular among both blacks and whites. And yet we see some positions dominated by blacks. What part of the black culture accounts for this dominance? Are other races discouraged from trying to excel at these positions?
Its not like soccer in the United States where almost anyone exchange student from South America or Europe is likely to be better than the average American college student. Its not just a matter of exposure and emphasis.
Yes I agree that most racial groups are very internally diverse. But when we are looking at the left tail of the curve for speed, the tails are thicker for blacks. Maybe we should just be looking at particular subgroups within the black population but those subgroups all seem to exist within the black population with very few subgroups that we need to focus on in the white Asian or Hispanic population. The differences are slight. If I can get a yard or two on you, I am effectively blowing you away.
The difference between a PGA champion and your local golf pro is probably less than one swing every 6 holes. But that is the difference between making millions of dollars a year playing gold or making $100/hour teaching chubby suburban dudes that golf clubs are not swung like baseball bats.
No of course not, but they usually become athletes.
So, I don’t know about you but in my lily white local high school, there is a high premium placed on excelling in athletics, primarily because of the college admissions advantage it brings. I don’t believe for a moment that the players in white neighborhoods don’t spend as much time in practice as the players in predominately black schools.
Sure a lot of white kids focus on other sports but not simply because they have a preference for lacrosse over football.
If football were the primary sport available to kids in our country (the way soccer is in some other countries), the speed positions would STILL be dominated by black men. A lot of sports don’t offer the same clear advantages to men who might be able to run half a second faster but a football team is a team of specialists where slight advantages can be magnified.
What fact is incorrect?
Because it undercuts your basic point that Blacks dominate in sports roles that require speed as a result of genes. If that were true, you wouldn’t see the opposite imbalances we do in other sports that require speed even with disparate demographic participation. It’s not as if no Black people play soccer, tennis, or hockey. Further, you don’t even see American football players dominating rugby despite the greatly overlapping skils required to play both games. Do Black players just not want the fame and adulation that comes with being a star rugby player?
No. However, “Black people” are not an ethic tribe with any overarching set of similarities that would translate to athletic dominance.
The issue is that those genetic superiority of professional athletes is almost certainly not due to their race.
But that is often not true over time or in the vast majority of sports. Where are all the dominant Black soccer strikers? Sure, there are some, but not anywhere near comparable amounts to NFL football, and there is a whole continent full of Black people who love soccer.
Of course certain races are steered into certain positions. That’s why there were almost no Black NFL QBs for decades. There were plenty of Black D1 QBs who were forced to switch to another position because the thinking was they just couldn’t play the position at an NFL level.
I’m glad you brought up soccer. Why do you think Brazilians and Germans tend to be great at soccer while Africans and the Americans seem to be pretty bad at soccer? Why is the answer not genes when you assume it is in other sports? Why don’t Black “speed genes” carry over?
But you don’t actually know that. You are just looking at professionals, and assuming that is the result of all other things being equal when they are not.
How do you know that? Fifty years ago, no one would have predicting how many Dominicans and Cubans would be playing MLB baseball. You are looking at a static picture and assuming that that one data point is illustrative of some greater genetic truth when there is zero reason to think that. Leave Black people out of it since that seems to be clouding your thinking. How do you explain the complete reversal of Jews and Gentiles in professional basketball? How do you explain early Scandinavian dominance of Olympic running losing out to American relative dominance in more recent years? How do genes explain the ebb and flow of professional participation in these sports?
So how do you explain the faster footspeed of black NFL players compared to players of other races again? What environmental factors gave these athletes faster footspeed?
And how many of the people on those African teams are white? You can’t compare the African players from some poor African country with the hyper conditioned players from Germany and say “see the German players are better so obviously there is no genetic element at play here”
If your argument is that access to sports makes a difference then I agree. You can’t be a good soccer player if you are not exposed to competitive soccer. If soccer were a big sport here with wide participation by people of all races, it would be dominated by black athletes.
So its racial stereotyping? White wide receivers are told to become tight ends and black quarterbacks are told to become running backs? Maybe there is something to that, the difference between quarterbacks might be harder to quantify because they use all sort of subjective criteria to determine who makes a good quarterback but its really hard to argue with flat out running speed for a safety or a wide receiver.
They do. Its just not dispositive. Genes are not the ONLY factor but given a relatively level playing field, natural ability seems to make a difference. And that different abilities are more useful in different sports.
A white college football player is going to be better at almost any position than a black dude that grew up playing cricket.
OK so tell me how the playing field s tilted in favor of black athletes that leads to their dominance of certain positions in football?
Genes are not the alpha and omega of athletics, there are other factors. And when those factors are equalized, we see the results we see in the NFL today.
For one thing – have you measured this? Do we have aggregate speed tests divided by race (along with things like height, weight, and position)? It’s certainly possible, but the white WRs and DBs in the NFL are really fast – is there a big difference between the speed of white WRs, DBs, and RBs, and black players in those positions?
Secondly, how do we explain the (presumable) faster footspeed of Jamaican sprinters as compared to Nigerian sprinters, or African American sprinters, or Haitian sprinters, or Ghanaian sprinters, or a myriad of others? Is there something special about Jamaican genetics?