This is a casual conversation. They don’t need to identify every single gene for me or any other rational person to come to this conclusion. I haven’t seen the studies that show short-to-long is a valid way to train or that 5k runs hurt 100m sprint performance at the elite level, but I sure as hell know I won’t be doing them anytime soon. You are confusing the issues here and I am not presupposing that we know everything, but us simply not knowing the specifics does not mean they do not exist.
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 ?
Most of these tests require some sort of specific conditioning (ie teaching) before hand. Understanding complex physics problems and being able to make difficult calculations is not an inherent human trait like sprinting is. Not to mention the majority of what you just mentioned do not even measure actual intelligence (as in, people can be quite intelligent and still perform poorly), while sprinting most definitely measures speed.
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.
These are different arguments and do not have the same logical bases. For example, I can look at West Africans that are in similar situations as other ethnicities and see they perform quite in line with what would be expected on average. I cannot say the same for sprinting where, regardless of socioeconomic status and even family upbringing, they continue to outperform Caucasians and every other ethnicity. In case you didn’t know, there are even individuals who have gone sub 10 who were adopted by families of another race from a very early age… I don’t know how much more one can rule out environmental factors than that.
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.
And Matt Shirvington never got any better, even with all of the top coaches and terrific funding and support in the world, he still couldn’t cut it. Tim Montgomery ran faster than that when he was a teenager and he barely got 3 square meals a day and had a whopping one year of “serious” training.
I think you meant to say exceptions, but either way, there are most definitely outliers. I never argued that there are not. In fact, anybody going sub 10, or even sub 11 for that matter, is by definition and outlier. The evidence is overwhelming, however, that certain groups are more predisposed to be good at certain things.
If it is true that academic & sports performance is limited by genetic racial factors then sports & academics should be 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.
This is not even part of what I was saying. I guess everything from skin color to hair type and height must have no genetic predisposition :). Sweet, because I have always found myself to be a bit pale and whenever I am outside I just get burnt and I always wanted to be 6’4" but I am stuck at just an average height.
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.
You just acknowledged that there are genetic variations. You don’t even understand what the hell the out of Africa hypothesis is.
Nice job quoting an article about a guy who is considered a joke academically. I TA the class the guy took on human evolution when he was in college and the professor is the same as then (ps Johanson barely passed and knows little about biology or genetics seeing as he didn’t take classes in either, but nice job anyway!). He is tremendous in the field, but there are numerous other scientists who have done substantially more and did not misrepresent their work to the degree Johanson has.
That is another matter altogether though. The fact that you acknowledge that there are genetic variations between races and we are talking about something that is determined by hundredths and thousandths of a second is plenty. It doesn’t take a whole lot of variation to go a long way. Remember there is only ~2% of variation, genetically, between humans and chimps (actually, that is an extreme oversimplification, but you are a simple minded person, so I’ll keep it simple for you ;)) and that 2% sure has gone a long way. When we are talking about a single skill that where the difference is incredibly tiny between the best performer ever and the #100 performer ever, it doesn’t take much variation to be significant.