Kicking. Squealing.
Sometimes truth is so undeniable that even the liberal press is forced to allow it through their filter. Of course, this only occurs with a certain amount of credentials. Such is the case with this article by Jon Entine over at The Daily Beast titled “What Makes a Great Olympian? Sometimes it’s Genetics.” Entine, who is an academic at George Mason University, even defends his column in the comments section.
One funny passage comes in the discussion of Kenyans’ dominance in long-distance running. Entine says that a common theory for Kenyan dominance is that children are “naturally trained” by, for example, running back and forth from home to school:
“That’s just silly,” Kenyan-born Wilson Kipketer told me. Kipketer currently holds eight of the 17 all-time fastest 800m times, a middle-distance track event. “I lived right next door to school,” he laughed, dismissing cookie-cutter explanations. “I walked, nice and slow.”
I have always thought that human races are comparable to the family of big cats. Cheetahs, lions and tigers and panthers all have different social structures and different ways of hunting, but they are all cats. We have evolved and adapted to different environments, uh duh!
The commentary is very energetic in its defense of the non-genetic approach to human life.
When I was in school, doing my master’s in biology (population genetics), this sort of stuff was uncontroversial.
As I’ve always said, the chief problem is that the liberal worldview, beyond fighting nonexistent racism, is desperate to avoid admitting that humans are just animals, too. It’s a kind-of liberal theology.
It is, of course, also completely wrong.
I wish I could find the link, but there’s a story of a Kenyan guy who tried to apply to a US college, but then got sent a cross country scholarship offer when they got him confused with someone else. (the guy had never run before in his life).
He never told them that they had the wrong guy and instead he scrambled to start on a crash course in distance running, being mainly self-taught and with little funding or equipment. Within one year he was running at a very competetive college level.
And there was also a Swedish cross country coach who toured rural Kenya with his all-star high school cc team. He said that in most small villages they would have DOZENS of kids who could trounce even in his best kids, and most of those Kenyans didn’t even know what official times they ran since they’d never competed formally.
Maybe the reason people try to deny the genetic factor is the fear the ,if funded properly, Kenya, Ethiopia and Ugandacould take every single qualifying spot for the Boston marathon leaving none for SWPL’s.
GMU always kills it in the economics department as well. I grew up in Fairfax, always been proud of their intellectual clear headedness.
Running in Kenya IS cultural. But too many people mix up cause and effect.
They aren’t good runners because they have a culture of running. They created a culture of running because they’re good at it.
Labrador Retrievers are about the same size as Siberian Huskies. But no one expects a Lab to pull a sled as well as a Husky. Yet the two have considerably less genetic distance from each other than do an average Kenyan, and an average Eskimo. The former are probably 300-400 generations apart, while the latter most likely has several thousand generations of separation. It always amazes me how the people who most strongly support evolution refuse to accept it’s consequences on humans.
That’s funny. I wonder why Kenyans are so good at distance running. I always thought it was living at a high elevation.
Lara, that and hot, dry conditions probably. They also have long slender limbs which seem like they’d conserve energy pretty well.
Black athletes and the desire to coach these blockheads have suffocated white participation. I’m sure more Christophe Lemaitres could be produced if white people were more interested in running and coaches and organizations invested in them. There are Japanese, Chinese and Eastern European runners who have been competive in short and long distance running. Those places have few black people to corrupt the system. Paula Radcliffe, an English woman, actually has the world record in women’s marathon running. On the men’s side running competitions have been dominated by black Sub-Sahara runners. Black people have longer limbs and larger glute muscles than all other racial groups. Boxing organizations measure arm span and black people usually have arm spans 3-4 inches longer than white people of the same height and 5-6 inches longer than East Asians. The same is true with black people’s legs in that they have much longer than non-black people. In the end it really doesn’t matter. Running 100 meters under 10 seconds doesn’t make the world go round. The Newtons and Edisons are not black and they have a much bigger impact on society than a sprinter ever will.
I… kind of fear for that guy’s tenure/position. The article was fine, but he made the mistake of responding to the idiots in the comments section. A whole lot. And it’s reasonable, but reasonable doesn’t cut it with the PC crowd.
Distance running at a high sustained speed is mostly a function of two things: on the chemical level, blood’s capacity to carry oxygen. On the mechanical level, the heart’s efficiency in pumping blood. Actual body frame is very distant tertiary factor.
Here’s John Entine swinging away in the comments:
“@jwangsw Okay, I supposed it’s racist to study patterned differences in disease or medical treatments? If you’re black, you damn well want to know if the person donating their bone marrow or stem cells to you is from the same population–or you will die. Now THAT’S racist. Get your head out the sand. Genetics is not a forum for political correctness. It’s about solving problems. Thankfully, sports provides a metaphor to discuss such things…with this kind of knee jerk–and ultimately racist–drivel. If you can handle cognitive dissonance and rational discourse, read my book: Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People, or the book Taboo–two very anti-racist discussions of the importance of population genetics.”
Guys got some balls.
Last week I was listening to NPR Morning Edition last week and one of their house reporters did a six minute piece on why certain people fare so well in specific Olympic sporting events. The word “genes” or “genetics” was never mentioned once. Turns out it really has to do with BMI or how late you start puberty. Usain Bolt was essentially faster because of height (the 100 meter is a controlled fall) and female gymnasts “had less weight to throw around”. In fact the suggestion was made that the only reason the top weight lifter was a man was that he had “short arms and legs”. You’d have thought thalidomide children would have dominated in that sport, while infants picked up the Gold in balance beam based on NPR’s trenchant analysis.
To tell the truth would lead to the great unwind. Humans have a great difficulty in believing that the course they are on is in fact the wrong one, that progress is always doing away with the past, even the parts that work.
you have to understand why liberal creationists will never face the music and accede that genes play a major role in human difference and group differences, and that human nature thus possess a characteristic immutability that is resistant to change from external intervention: to do so would mean betraying their principles. and that’s a betrayal few egos can comfortably accommodate.
therefore, the only way to defeat liberal creationists is to ridicule them so mercilessly that they skulk to their tiny hugboxes to cry it out in silence, far away from the levers of power.
They also have long slender limbs which seem like they’d conserve energy pretty well.
Long, slender limbs will dissipate heat very well by giving more surface area. Compare the Dinka of Sudan to the round, weeble-wobble shaped Eskimo, whose body shape miminizes the ratio of surface area to internal mass to conserve heat.
Having spent some time in East Africa, I always thought black Kenyans’ apparent long-distance running abilities were due to chasing after tourist buses.
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Of course, the author was only allowed to claim victory is based on “superior DNA” because the athletes under discussion were black. Had they been white, like Michael Phelps, the article would never have been written.
Interestingly the article concludes that whites are built for hand to hand combat (wrestling) and blacks are built for running away.