

Why English speakers dominate sprinting events - occam
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/08/100-meters-why-so-anglophone.html

======
maxklein
The reason for this: The best sprinters in the world come from West Africa.
Say what you want, this is simply true. I'm going to go through a series of
logical steps, and I would like you to see if I can get you to agree with my
conclusion

The biggest time survival of the fittest comes into play is during a war. When
a war happens, the people unfit to fight in the war get pruned out of the gene
pool.

West Africa has a landscape that is different from most of the world - the
bush. The bush is what happens when humans live near a jungle - they trim down
the trees, and low vegetation tends to grow. In East Africa, you tend to have
savannah and grasslands which can be walked through. You cannot walk through a
bush.

West African wars have tradditionally been fought with machetes. Not with
spears, not with guns, not with swords, but with Machetes. A machete is a
proximity instrument, and the best way to defeat someone in a machete fight is
to be the one to strike first.

A west African war looks this way - all the men paint themselves in black, and
walk at night through the bushes till they are near a village. A village is
usually cleared of grass and bush, so there is no cover. When a whistle is
sounded, the men burst out of the bush and run at high speed towards the
village, winning the war by force.

The men in the village have a few seconds to prepare, and they do so by
grabbing their machetes and running as quick as possible away, then circling
back.

Traditional west African wars are high speed dashes with heavy instruments, in
the night, and with lots of fire. It's the perfect enviroment to have gene
pool selection for dashes.

Contrast this with East Africa, where the savannag lead to Bows & Arrows and
Spears being used as war weapons.

~~~
biohacker42
Faulty reasoning and crap evidence. If what you say is true why is the tiny
island of Jamaica vastly dominant instead of any of the MILLIONS more west
Africans in west Africa?

Further more natural selection is rarely as neat and tidy as described. Why
didn't west Africans evolve superb night vision, to see the men painted black?
Why didn't they evolve supreme hearing, to hear the sneaky approach?

While it may be possible west Africans are faster due to genetics, your
evidence and theories are bit too neat.

~~~
maxklein
That's a weak counter argument. Natural selection happens only when things
happen on a grand scale. Like during wars. Africans generally have better
vision than many other ethnic groups, but there are no vision olympics.

Jamaica is more dominant for cultural reasons - the people there are more
likely to have the opportunity to train for the olympics than in West Africa.

How do you want to account for Natural Selection then? There are no animals
left in the world which are capable of killing humans in quantities that would
favour one trend over the other. There is no disease that selects for Speed.
There is only one predator that can cause the natural selection for speed
among humans - and that is other human beings!

West Africans are distinct from other African groups when it comes to genetic
specialisation - take a look at the wikipedia page on sickle cell anemia for
example. Also take a look at language families as some data to cross reference
with.

My evidence is speculatory, but it's realistic, I believe. My reasoning is
however logical.

~~~
biohacker42
I am not so sure it is logical. Obviously groups of people have genetic
differences. Sickle cell anemia is a great example, here we have exactly one
gene which gives malaria resistance with one copy and immunity and anemia with
two. And endemic malaria is one hell of a natural selector.

But suppose I claimed that the long standing domination of Romanian gymnasts
was genetic. And then I came up an elaborate explanation involving contests of
balance and bouncing set to music that decide which maiden gets to marry.
Strictly speaking a logical theory but not very smart.

Cultural reasons are a huge contributor, just look at the Russian relay team
and their baton passing skills.

Then there's simple genetic drift and founders effect. Those are most often
responsible for genetic differences. The Ashkenazi are descendant from a VERY
small group of founders. What is a very rare genetic mutation, by accident
became common in the Ashkenazi population.

That's simple genetics, but natural selection is much more complicated. The
Jamaicans might have more fast twitch muscle fiber due to natural selection,
or they might have it because of a genetic bottle neck in the slave trade.

The few Africans who got to Jamaica first happened to have rare genes and
there you go founders effect. Or it just might be all cultural with no
genetics.

The elaborate scenario with villages and night time warfare and running (but
no moats?) is only slightly more serious then any scenario involving music
coordinated gymnastics based natural selection in Romania.

------
msie
Quite a controversial author:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer>

------
seano
I think the answer is somewhat more obvious. Look at the facilities, coaches
and funding available for athletes in the USA, Jamaica, and Britain compared
to West Africa.

~~~
bokonist
He wasn't comparing the USA/West Indies/Britain to West Africa. He was asking
why USA/West Indies/Britain/West Africa do so much better than Brazil and
other non-anglophone countries.

------
Tichy
What about doping? Another throwaway idea: racism still exists, so the blacker
somebody looks, the more likely they'll have to resort to desperate means like
allowing dangerous medical experiments on their bodies (doping) to still have
some success in society. (I am not claiming this is the explanation, just want
to point out another possible explanation).

~~~
occam
That doesn't explain why west Africans are so strong at sprinting but very
weak at distance running, while east Africans are the opposite (dominant in
distance running, very weak sprinters), nor why whites are somewhat
competitive in the middle distances but not sprints and long distances.

~~~
Tichy
You have to be careful with "explain" - sure you can "explain" anything with a
presumed genetic disposition. That is in general not really a proof, only yet
another theory. I just wanted to point out that there are alternative
explanations.

For example, Europeans tend to be really good at soccer, whereas Americans
suck at it. Is it genetic? I highly doubt it, since the European genes are
readily available in the US. It has a cultural reason (simple statistics -
popular sports - higher percentage of kids trying it - higher percentage of
talents being discovered).

~~~
Tichy
I want to add to this a question, because I truly don't know: who are the kids
picking up running 100m distances as their main sport? What is their
motivation? I can imagine why people get into team sports, for example, but I
can't imagine a huge number of people go into 100m running out of intrinsic
self motivation, simply because it is so much fun to run 100m?

So maybe the "system" matters much more for 100m running than for most other
sports. The system being things like "scholarships in exchange for sports",
the way talent gets identified and promoted, and so on. Just saying that this
would be another aspect that might distort the statistics.

I recently heard the quote "Jamaica is too small to have their own drug
testing agency"...

------
rms
<https://www.23andme.com/gen101/variation/speed/>

------
akuafo
why is this story listed on hacker news?

~~~
rkts
Someone ought to write a script that scans every submission for the words
"startup," "Paul Graham," and "Y Combinator" and posts some variation of "Not
Hacker News!!!!!" whenever it doesn't find them. At least it would save you
all some effort.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I think that's a great idea.

...

Okay, I'm joking. A _bot_ which votes automatically is a bad idea. But, in all
seriousness: Perhaps every single article should come with a tiny button to
press, with a label: "I believe this article is offtopic for HN".

This suggestion has been made thousands of times by now. The counter-argument
-- a good one -- is that enabling the downvoting of articles empowers gangs of
organized downvoters to kill content from the site for arbitrary reasons.
Everyone knows the kind of trouble that causes.

But that presumes that the downvote button is _hooked up to something_ in the
site's software. It doesn't need to be. Just display a tiny number that is the
number of accumulated downvotes. Let the people who read each article, and
decide whether to upvote it or not, choose whether or not to ignore that
number.

In the absence of this feature, the users reinvent it for themselves, as we
have seen again and again.

You may ask why the people who wish to express disapproval of an article can't
just write a thoughtful post that explains why, instead of clicking a little
DOWNVOTE button. The short answer is that to acknowledge a troll is to feed
the troll. The longer answer is that some trolls are much more subtle than
others: The ones who use rude one-liners are easy to spot, but there are
others who will suck you into endlessly circling, long-winded, bad-faith
arguments filled with chaff. You'll refute something, and they'll respond with
a mixture of inaccurate and irrelevant bullet points; and you'll introduce
good points of your own, and they'll be ignored in future posts; and if by
some miracle you create a really compelling counter-argument, the troll will
go away for two days and then come back, advancing the same argument that he
did two days ago, as if the counter-argument had never existed. You can't
avoid such people by engaging them -- engagement is what they want. You have
to learn their reputations and politely but firmly avoid them.

Which I do. But that doesn't mean I want to sit idly by while effluvia
overflows the front page of HN. The site could really use a "cold shoulder"
button.

[EDIT: Okay, I promoted this crazy idea to its own submission:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281431> ]

~~~
akuafo
Something like that sounds like a good idea, and sorry for my overly brief
dismissal of the post that started this discussion.

I actually didn't mean to say the story shouldn't be listed at all. It just
seemed unscientific (and borderline inappropriate) and below the usual
standards for the site.

------
omouse
Not Hacker news.

~~~
abstractbill
I find the "cure" (endless threads about things not being hacker news) much
worse than the disease.

~~~
omouse
I did it because I saw some comment

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280676>

mentioning it. My poor attempt at humour, heh. I forgot some exclamation marks
too!

~~~
abstractbill
Ah, my apologies then, it's rather easy to miss that kind of humor in this
medium.

------
josefresco
Lame, I'm sorry but I don't accept his conclusion at all.

~~~
byrneseyeview
I think the word "Lame" should be reserved for responding to an essay on
language, history, human genetics, sports, and culture with a one-word
sentence that disagrees without reason or evidence. Lame.

~~~
ReverendBayes
Ok, how about expounding this way: Unevidenced, unfalsifiable hypothesis
presented as an explanation, with all the rigor of an armchair Olympics viewer
armed with a 6 pack. Lame.

