Re:Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?
by eleusive on Sunday August 28, 2011 @11:38PM
(#2935797)
This series of articles[1] goes into some depth in explaining why certain countries (and ethnicities) dominate various sports - this includes an in-depth discussion of why Kenyans are so good at distance running. The author focuses on genetics, location, support, training, incentives, culture, etc. of various combinations of these sports and the countries that seem to dominate them.
It's not yet complete and is quite lengthy, but it's one of the most fascinating things I've read in some time. While the title seems to make the article focuses solely on Olympic Weightlifting, but the main focus is much more general, and is about uncovering recurring patterns between countries who dominate various sports.
[1] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/why-the-us-sucks-a...
Re:Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?
by jacques_chester on Monday August 29, 2011 @12:54AM
(#2935994)
Olympic Weightlifting is an interesting case. Some of the qualities that predict weightlifting success -- high fast-twitch fibre ratio, for example -- predict success in plenty of other sports.
Whether a country excels at Weightlifting seems in large part to be a function of whether there is a more popular sport in that country. So in the Carribean potential lifters become sprinters, in the USA they become NFL players, in Australia rugby and AFL players and so on.
Re:Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?
by geuis on Sunday August 28, 2011 @11:26PM
(#2935771)
You're right, but that's only part of the extended question. If most 100m runners are from a tiny part of the world, it would be interesting to do biological studies to see if the people living there have different genetics that let them become better runners. Your control in this type of study would be to put non-locals under the same lifestyle and training as how the winners live and see how they perform.
After edit: the kind first reply to my comment here mentions a possible study design for looking at what might influence athletic success among athletes from one place or another. A "genetically sensitive" design for such a study would have to consider quite a few other issues, not least actual individual genes, which have been surprisingly neglected in genetic research over the years. (Rather than actually looking at genes of each individual in a study, which continues to be a generally expensive and occasionally error-prone enterprise, most previous genetic studies of human behavioral characteristics have been based on proxy assemblages of genes, by studying closely related family members, or in the best cases monozygotic twins.)
Readers who haven't seen this pair of links before, which I share fairly often here on HN because they are by world famous human behavioral geneticists, may be surprised by what they learn from reading about what twin studies can and cannot say about genetic influences on human behavior.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
Meanwhile other readers have commented, and tying in what I've written (and linked to) above to what several comments here say, a common fallacy comes from assuming that "race" (as socially defined in one place or another) has anything much at all to do with what genes one would find in a particular individual. Serious geneticists are actually some of the leading scientists in suggesting that in medicine, law, and education we should pay less attention to "race" than formerly, to avoid inherent cognitive biases in explaining individual differences.