Fair point on the claims, you have not claimed the hypothesis is incorrect.
What I’m not sure of is the end point. You said that you’d be convinced when someone did real scientific tests to prove the hypothesis. I wonder what kind of test a scientist could come up with to prove a race’s dominance in running speed that would be different than taking hundreds of thousands of young men and women, and asking them to run for 100 meters while timing them closely.
Yes, that’s the problem. We can’t assume that pro football players represent some random sample from the general population. You wouldn’t need hundred of thousands, though. You’d just need to make sure you were taking random samples and that you had some control over what “race” meant. Afterall, in the US “race” is more about physical appearance than genetic ancestry. Tiger Woods is generally considered to be Black, but he probably only traces 25% of his ancestry to Africa (maybe less). If we went by genetic heritage, he’d be considered Asian-- he’s more that than anything.
In the end, you might only be able to reach the conclusion that people of mixed African/European ancestry tend to have better skills at some athletic activities. It’s another issue entirely to ask if some population of Africans (actual Africans, not African-Americans) has a genetic advantage to some population of Europeans. And, of course, it’s not like White Americans represent some genetic population that traces its ancestry to some unique European population, either. Just thinking of myself, the ancestors I have (that I know of) come from all over Europe.
For anyone interested, here is a Scientific American article (actually a book review) on the subject. The author makes many of the same arguments I have made in this thread. It’s a subject fraught with scientific difficulties, and about which it is easy to jump to unwarranted conclusions.
But we are not talking about races in this case. We are talking about populations. Blacks in america, who may be traced to w. african roots, do not represent all blacks. E. africans are not known for their sprinting. Broadening the discussion to include the attributes of all black people in the world is very difficult to do since there are so many varied populations within that group.
So a discovery that african americans tend to have genes that give advantage in sprinting events really says nothing about the genetic traits of black people as a whole – and cuts short the leap that you worry about people making.
Look, while I appreciate that nothing is “proven” until you obtain empirical evidence to back it up, with a control, it is possible to know something without having it proven.
I know that my hot tap is likely to produce warmer water than the cold tap, even though I have no evidence to back that up.
I know, as a football fan, that there are perhaps three or four players of European descent capable of “deep-threat” speed - ie. a sub-4.4 second 40-yard dash time. I also know that there are at least thirty and probably closer to a hundred players of African or Caribbean descent capable of doing the same thing.
Sure, social pressure can explain some of the disparity, but if there’s a white kid at XYZ High who can run a 4.4-second 40 and bench 275 pounds, he’s going to end up playing football most of the time. These kids aren’t not playing football because they’re off running Fortune 500 companies or whatever- they simply don’t exist, for the most part.
If you have more of the alleles likely to be found in North/West African peoples, you’re more likely to run fast and jump high. That’s it.
And yet, it need not. Differences in academic and/or intellectual performance are readily explained by social phenomena - American blacks are likely to attend poorer schools, use poorer educational materials, and have fewer role models who clearly demonstrate the value of an education.
In fact, the proclivity of African-Americans to excel in sports may hamper their academic achievement most of all; if you live in the projects, you see others who “got out” through sports daily on ESPN, but you’re hardly likely to see other blacks who “got out” through business, beyond, say, Russell Simmons.
Well, sure. Since the OP was about American football, I assume we all are limiting our discussion to American Blacks.
I’m not sure why you linked to that post of mine for your comment. I was giving a factual answer to someone who asked a question about genetics.
Biology, genetics and the physiology of sports is a lot more complicated that you think. Read the link to the Scientific American article in my earlier post.
Publish your findings in a scientific journal, and then get back to us on how that went.
This hasn’t been responded to (probably for good reason), but I do want to dispel the idea that slaves were “bred”. Slave populations had a definitive culture, which included marriage and other traditional familail relationships. The notion that a slave master selected which slaves mated, as if they were livestock, is, at best, ignorant.
Put together an all-white Olympic team and get back to us on how that went.
Or better yet, an NFL team.
The Soviets did pretty well with that for many years.
Thanks for the link. This really is a complicated issue.
Did well in certain sports, yes. Not all. I am not sure how many male Soviet/DDR sprinters won crowns even at the height of the dope-fueled Eastern Bloc Olympics Blitz.
I just want to point out that the 8 fastest men on earth lined up last March and raced 60 meters at the World Championship. 2 of those 8 - whittled down from many prior events and races were “white” men. You can watch the race here (an African American former Steeler wins) & a white man is 3rd.
I think this just demonstrates how hard it is to talk about race and who has speed and who doesn’t as a racial group in any meaningful way. It really is a complex thing
While this may be a complex thing, it’s not so complex that we can’t talk about it “in any meaningful way.” No one is suggesting that *all *blacks are faster than *all *whites, but rather that there are group tendencies among certain white populations and certain black populations that give those black populations a competitive advantage.
In fact the racial makeup of the event you point to supports and actually extends that claim. The OP was limited to Americans playing an American sport, but here we have a truly international sport, and even then Black participants outnumber white participants 8 to 2. I know that Blacks make up about 12% of the population in America, but I don’t know what their world-wide percentage is. I suspect it’s nowhere near 80%, though.
In reply
This is just silly. The technology to measure the speeds of athletes and rigorous controls employed by Olympic officials can not be improved upon by scientists. Tabulation of sport results have yielded a data base that can only be envied by researchers.
Following Mace’s argument, I suppose we can’t be sure that the cheetah is the fastest animal on earth . We’ll have to genetically test every cheetah to make sure it is a cheetah and run a significant sample of cheetahs against a significant sample of genetically tested animals of every other species of animal. Even then, who’s to say that the tiger might not be the fastest mammal on earth. After all, environment might have slowed down the tiger which learned to run in tall grasslands while the cheetah runs on much shorter grass.
Here’s one more point in favour of the physiological advantage of elite black athletes over whites.
This is from Jon Entine, the subject of Mace’s Scientific American link.
I don’t think there is any argument that suggests that steroids are not an advantage. After all, steroid doping is considered cheating for undue advantage. But just in case, I’ll provide a reference to two studies measuring the relationship of elite athletic performance and testosterone levels.
I triend to find a more “scientific” link to improve the veracity of the claim that blacks had more testosterone, but all I could come up with are prostate cancer studies claiming that there are no testosterone differences between blackand white prostate cancer patients
It seems that during the formative years as well as the age range of elite athletes blacks have higher testosterone levels. Testosterone affects both aggressiveness and physiological characteristics. I don’t think this contributor can be ignored.
Similarly, you have to acknowledge that Chinese people, in general, just don’t make good sprinters. The Chinese athletic talent-spotting programs are brilliant and intensive, but AFAIK no Chinese male has won gold at the Olympics or World Championships in a sprinting event.
Given the sheer numbers of Chinese, absent any inherent genetic disadvantage there ought to be at least a few.
My own people- Indians- face the same disadvantage. The best athletic talent in India is playing cricket or (field) hockey- niche sports elsewhere- and yet Indian teams don’t dominate these sports.
Conversely, you can look at New Zealand, where Maoris (pop. circa 250,000) are vastly outnumbered by the “white” population (a little under 5,000,000), yet make up just under a third of the current 30-man national rugby squad.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this…
…is a really, really bad argument. Cheetahs cannot produce viable offspring with other large cats, even if they were to breed with them (which they don’t). The amount of genetic variation between even human populations which have been isolated from others for 30,000 years would be negligible compared to the amount of genetic variation between, say, cheetahs and lions, which have inhabited the same ranges for at least the span of human existence.
I’m making a note to get to the feedstore to get some more straw for you since you must be running out after building those two big strawmen:
I said it is hard to talk about it in any meaningful way
Yeah including me.
The point of the post was to answer people like yourself who were clearly veering toward the blacks as a group are inherently genetically faster than whites as a partial answer to the OP. Were that true there should be NO whites in the higher level meets because the whites would always be slower at the elite levels no matter how much training or coaching or equipment they had – the muscle distribution or quick twitch muscle or breeding or whatever genetic sh^t would always win out at the elite level. It would be like trying to train sprinters to win the Kentucky Derby.
That clearly isn’t happening anywhere in track at the elite levels. Right ? Is anyone sane going to offer anything different? Clearly there is more going on here & its very complex.
Um… what?
Ridiculous. He’s not saying “all white people are slow”, he’s saying “black people are more likely to be fast”. He clearly referred to a tendency, not an absolute.