What is the fastest 100m ran by a caucasion person?

[Sharmer]

@fogelson

From Science 30 July 2004:
Vol. 305. no. 5684, pp. 637 - 639

Various studies have shown that West African athletes have denser bones, less body fat, narrower hips, thicker thighs, longer legs, and lighter calves than whites. But the differences between East and West Africans are even more striking. The fabled Kenyan runners are small, thin, and tend to weigh between 50 and 60 kilograms, whereas West African athletes are taller and a good 30 kilograms heavier, says Timothy Noakes, a prominent exercise physiologist and researcher at the University of Cape Town.

The differences don’t stop with body shape; there is also evidence of a difference in the types of muscle fibers that predominate. Scientists have divided skeletal muscles into two basic groups depending on their contractile speed: type I, or slow-twitch muscles, and type II, fast-twitch muscles. There are two kinds of the latter: type IIa, intermediate between fast and slow; and type IIb, which are superfast-twitch. Endurance runners tend to have mostly type I fibers, which have denser capillary networks and are packed with more mitochondria. Sprinters, on the other hand, have mostly type II fibers, which hold lots of sugar as well as enzymes that burn fuel in the absence of oxygen. In the 1980s, Claude Bouchard’s team at Quebec’s Laval University took needle biopsies from the thigh muscles of white French Canadian and black West African students. They found that the Africans averaged significantly more fast-twitch muscle fibers—67.5%—than the French Canadians, who averaged 59%.

Endurance runners have up to 90% or more slow-twitch fibers, Saltin reports. Bouchard, now at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, says his team looked at two enzymes that are markers for oxidative metabolism and found higher activity of both in the West Africans, meaning they could generate more ATP, the energy currency of the cell, in the absence of oxygen. The study suggests that in West Africa there may be a larger pool of people “with elevated levels of what it takes to perform anaerobically at very high power output,” says Bouchard.

Although training can transform superfast-twitch type IIb fibers into the hybrid type IIa, it is unlikely to cause slow- and fast-twitch fibers to exchange identities. Myburgh says there is evidence that, with extremely intensive long-distance training, fast IIa fibers can change to slow type I fibers. So far, however, there is no evidence that slow-twitch fibers can be turned into fast-twitch ones. As an athlete puts on muscle mass through training, new fibers are not created, but existing fibers become bigger.

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Black male athletes have 26% more muscle viscosity than white male athletes. Black females have 45% greater muscle viscosity than white female athletes(Farley & Gonzalez 1996)

West African sprinters have lower shank inertia in which would allow them to spend less energy on moving their limbs (Rahmani 2004).

Senegalese sprinters were less strong and less powerful at high speeds in a squat movement compared to Italian sprinters of the same 100-m times although muscle abilities involved in slow maximal contractions were similar(Rahmani 2004).

Yep. Nigeria and Namibia (probably some others, but I forget off the top of my head). If we extend it to those who have gone under 10/20 seconds as opposed to just those that are world or Olympic champions, the list becomes significantly larger.

And if you include countries that are made up of predominantly West Africans… well you get the picture.

The fact that the country of China with over a billion people and TONS of great facilities, state sponsorship, etc. (or the Soviet Union at its “peak”) can’t/couldn’t muster up a single athlete male 100m athlete that could compete with St. Kitts & Nevis, the Netherlands Antilles, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Namibia, the Bahamas, and numerous other countries kind of hurts your argument here.

It’s good that you’re using evidence to support your viewpoint. However the evidence you cite does not show specific genetics of West African’s and compared to other racial groups. Therefore the evidence does not support the argument.

As I have pointed out earlier avoid comparing group performance. This tells us little about the human genome of differing racial groups.

If you compare the average Indian/East Asian academic performance in fields of physics you will find scores much lower for the West African group. You can use a whole range of intellectual activities, chess, spelling bee, SAT, UAI, grade point averages etc and the East Asian/Indian group will score significantly higher than people of West African origin will.Does this mean west Africans are less intelligent ?

The logic of your argument means that West African origin athletes are genetically superior for sprint running and intellectually less skilled for academic performance. Do you agree with this statement? Or do you wish to use group performance to support your argument for sprint performance and ignore group performance for academic performance because it shows West Africans to be less intelligent.

Maybe in the future scientist will discover that academic/sports performance is limited by racial genetic factors. But I doubt it! - Matt Shirvington ran 10.03 at 19yrs and sure there are some high scoring intellectuals from the West African group. Therefore there will always be exemptions to this the racial advantage theory.

If it is true that academic & sports performance is limited by genetic racial factors then sports & academics should have racial divisions. Now this is not such a foreign concept. In Fiji indigenous Fijians have lower entry scores for university. In Australia indigenous aborigines also have lower entry scores for university courses. Should we create racial thresholds to both academic & sport performance? should there be a white/black Olympic final ? Not sure what guys like Spearman or Mo would do, since they’re of mixed race.

What even refutes your theory more is the out of African hypothesis of human evolution. The human species did originate from African Savanna some 55,000-10, 0000 years ago. We may look different but our genetic variations between racial groups are small.

The Out of Africa Model 13 asserts that modern humans evolved relatively recently in Africa, migrated into Eurasia and replaced all populations which had descended from Homo erectus. Critical to this model are the following tenets:
Out of Africa theory: homo sapiens arose in Africa and migrated to other parts of the world to replace other hominid species, including homo erectus.

* after Homo erectus migrated out of Africa the different populations became reproductively isolated, evolving independently, and in some cases like the Neanderthals, into separate species
* Homo sapiens arose in one place, probably Africa (geographically this includes the Middle East)
* Homo sapiens ultimately migrated out of Africa and replaced all other human populations, without interbreeding

 modern human variation is a relatively recent phenomenon

  Studies of contemporary DNA, especially mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which occurs only in the cellular organelles called mitochondria, reveal that humans are astonishingly homogeneous, with relatively little genetic variation.1,5
*

The high degree of similarity between human populations stands in strong contrast to the condition seen in our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees.2 In fact, there is significantly more genetic variation between two individual chimpanzees drawn from the same population than there is between two humans drawn randomly from a single population. Furthermore, genetic variation between populations of chimpanzees is enormously greater than differences between European, Asian and African human populations.

Africans display higher genetic variation than other populations, supporting the idea that they were the first modern humans.

*

  In support of an African origin for Homo sapiens the work of Cann and Wilson1 has demonstrated that the highest level of genetic variation in mtDNA occurs in African populations. This implies that Homo sapiens arose first in Africa and has therefore had a longer period of time to accumulate genetic diversity. Using the genetic distance between African populations and others as a measure of time, they furthermore suggested that Homo sapiens arose between 100,000 and 400,000 years ago in Africa.
*

  The low amount of genetic variation in modern human populations suggests that our origins may reflect a relatively small founding population for Homo sapiens. Analysis of mtDNA by Rogers and Harpending12 supports the view that a small population of Homo sapiens, numbering perhaps only 10,000 to 50,000 people, left Africa somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson, is professor of anthropology and Director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. He is best known for his discovery of “Lucy”, a 3.2 million-year old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton he found in 1974 in Ethiopia. His books include Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind and, most recently, From Lucy to Language. Dr. Johanson hosted the Emmy-nominated NOVA television series In Search of Human Origins