Quote from Mav88:
Studies have been done but I don't care to look them up. Blacks from west africa, and west only, have evolved a higher density of fast twitch muscle fiber, and the have a slightly different bone structure than the rest of the planet. Fast twitch is ideal for short running events.
East africans are skinnier and have more slow twitch fiber, that's why they compete in the distance events . Kenyans dominate marathons.
Scientifically it makes sense that if one major organ like the skin and a genetic feature like muscle structure is different, then so it is very possible that another organ like the brain is different. But that's where liberal religion says no. So its ok that they are better athletically, but there is no difference cognitively by decree according to liberal gospel. Most of us know better.
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http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01-06.htm
"I'm going to start with the idea that many people hold, that there is some special athletic prowess held by people of African descent in America. Most people sort of believe that African Americans are genetically predisposed to being faster runners or better basketball players or for being better cornerbacks in the National Football League. And there's also now some scientific studies which are attempting to look at population-based differences in genes that have to do with various aspects of physiological performance related to athletic ability.
Now, at some level, when we look at human physical variation, there are some differences between human populations that could possibly relate to athletic performance. For example, if we were to look at people from northern climates, who were indigenous residents of northern climates, they tend to be short and stout instead of long or tall and lean. And there are good physical reasons for that. If you evolved in northern climates, like the Aleut or the Eskimo populations did, heat retention is facilitated by being short and stout. If you evolved in the tropics, where the environment is very hot, then heat loss is facilitated by being long and lean. So you're going to see differences in body proportions on that kind of scale.
Now, if you were to ask yourself, "Is it likely that an Alaskan Eskimo is going to become a center in the NBA?", well, probably not, because height has something to do with your performance at that position in the NBA. So, we can see that in the gross scale it's likely that physical differences may have something to do with various forms of athletic performance.
But when we talk about subtle things like, for example, whether a given population is going to be fastest in sprinting, then it's not so simple. The fact is that most of the world record holders in the 100-meter dash are of Western African descent, but they also tend to be African-Americans who have mixed with Europeans and American Indians. So it's not easy for us to determine whether it's being African that might have something to do with them being so fast, or whether it's the fact that they have European and American Indian ancestry that might have helped them be so fast.
And all of those genetic factors have to be tempered in terms of the environment in which individuals train. For example, if you look at those sprinters of Western African ancestry, they all got their records because they trained in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, or even in the Caribbean. If you look at the Western African countries where those sprinters' ancestors supposedly came from, none of those countries have ever produced any world record holders in the sprint events.
So if it was something uniquely about being African that makes you a fast sprinter, then you'd expect that Western African countries would be holding all these records too, but in fact they don't. It has something to do with genetic predisposition, it has something to do with environment, it has something to do with training regimes, and particularly at the level of world-class athletic performance.
One of the factors that shows how the situation of populations in different geographical regions influences predisposition for sport is altitude. The Kenyan success in long-distance running may have something to do with the fact that the Kalenjin Kenyans come from a high-altitude region in Kenya. But, Kenyans from low altitudes don't do well in long-distance running, so it's not something special about being a Kenyan, it's something special about living at those high altitudes.
Now, in the last Boston Marathon, which (laughter) someone predicted would be won by a Kalenjin Kenyan, it was in fact won by a South Korean. Now, Korea is also a mountainous country, and so it's entirely possible that this individual at least trained at high altitude. Second place was won by an Ecuadorian, which also is a mountainous country, and they also probably trained at a high altitude.
So we have both short-term physiological adaptation that occurs from training in high altitude, and also long-term genetic adaptations for living at high altitude that might come from populations who live in those regions. And again, none of these things are consistent with our 19th century notions of race, because within the same country low-altitude Kenyans don't do well at long-distance running whereas high-altitude Kenyans do.
So we can't come to any fast, hard rule about how genetic ancestry is going to influence the ability of an individual to perform an athletic event. I think that the simplest thing is to look at the individual's history, how hard they trained, where they got their training, what kinds of resources were put into getting them to be able to participate in world-class athletics, that it's a combination of all these things and that we'll never have a simple genetic answer that says, "Because you came from this region of the world, you're going to dominate in swimming or long-distance running." I don't think we're ever going to have that."
