Just some thoughts on race and genetics

[SoCalCoug]

Just to be clear. I think the term "race" is simply a label we put on the end product of tens of thousands of years of human evolution, to describe recognizable groups of people according to visible characteristics, who until the last 200 years were largely separated by distance and natural barriers.

I don't subscribe to what I believe is a very misguided opinion that one "race" is somehow "better" than another.

I saw a post over on CB that was talking about BYU's inability to recruit speed - i.e., black athletes.

I recall having a discussion with a co-worker years ago where he vigorously denied any difference in the physiology of white people and black people that result in black people tending to be faster sprinters than white people. I told him that I ran track in high school, and all the sprinters were black. I think both the black guys and the white guys acknowledged that generality (yeah, there were some exceptions).

This guy insisted that the difference was entirely learned - white kids weren't expected to be fast runners, and so they focused on other things.

Whether his position was correct or not, his logic was very flawed. I do know that pro sports which rely heavily on athleticism seem to have a higher percentage of black athletes than are in the normal population.

I was reading something recently - some article about evolving theories of the migration of early humans. The prevailing theory is that humans originated in Africa, and spread out to Europe and Asia in a few distinct migrations. Apparently, the way the migrations happened (relatively small groups over a small period of time) affected the genetic diversity of those migrating groups. Because they were smaller groups who were likely already substantially interrelated, their genetic diversity was much lower than that of the human population as a whole.

The result is that there is a significantly greater amount of genetic diversity among the people of Africa than there is among any other "race" around the world.

Suburban white people see black people primarily in the context of sports. Therefore, athleticism is the most highly visible aspect of the black people that the non-urban population sees. Therefore, what we tend to see as an increased athleticism is just the most visible manifestation of the genetic diversity of Africans. In other words, in a less genetically diverse group, you would expect to see far more similarity in ability and characteristic than you would in a genetically diverse population. In terms of athleticism, I would think (I could be wrong - I'm a lawyer, not an anthropologist) that you would see a greater range of athleticism in a genetically diverse population than you would in a less genetically diverse population. Therefore, a greater incidence of high athletic ability. And if, over the centuries, increased athleticism gave an evolutionary advantage, natural selection would tend to skew this characteristic toward the higher end.

I'd be interested in what someone who actually has experience in anthropology thinks about this - in other words, where are the holes in my theory?

One of the things that comes to mind is that if this is the case, racial segregation actually does a great disservice to the less genetically diverse populations.

Another is to think of the great talents and abilities of African people who are repressed by the third-world conditions and oppressive governments in Africa. What a great waste of human resources and talent - people who could be great blessings to the rest of the world.

Just some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head this evening.

[wuapinmon]

I think woot can speak to this better than anyone else. I'm not sure he will agree with what's written, but that's why it's good to have a biology dude on our staff.

[woot]

Just to be clear. I think the term "race" is simply a label we put on the end product of tens of thousands of years of human evolution, to describe recognizable groups of people according to visible characteristics, who until the last 200 years were largely separated by distance and natural barriers.

I don't subscribe to what I believe is a very misguided opinion that one "race" is somehow "better" than another.

I saw a post over on CB that was talking about BYU's inability to recruit speed - i.e., black athletes.

I recall having a discussion with a co-worker years ago where he vigorously denied any difference in the physiology of white people and black people that result in black people tending to be faster sprinters than white people. I told him that I ran track in high school, and all the sprinters were black. I think both the black guys and the white guys acknowledged that generality (yeah, there were some exceptions).

This guy insisted that the difference was entirely learned - white kids weren't expected to be fast runners, and so they focused on other things.

Whether his position was correct or not, his logic was very flawed. I do know that pro sports which rely heavily on athleticism seem to have a higher percentage of black athletes than are in the normal population.

I was reading something recently - some article about evolving theories of the migration of early humans. The prevailing theory is that humans originated in Africa, and spread out to Europe and Asia in a few distinct migrations. Apparently, the way the migrations happened (relatively small groups over a small period of time) affected the genetic diversity of those migrating groups. Because they were smaller groups who were likely already substantially interrelated, their genetic diversity was much lower than that of the human population as a whole.

The result is that there is a significantly greater amount of genetic diversity among the people of Africa than there is among any other "race" around the world.

Suburban white people see black people primarily in the context of sports. Therefore, athleticism is the most highly visible aspect of the black people that the non-urban population sees. Therefore, what we tend to see as an increased athleticism is just the most visible manifestation of the genetic diversity of Africans. In other words, in a less genetically diverse group, you would expect to see far more similarity in ability and characteristic than you would in a genetically diverse population. In terms of athleticism, I would think (I could be wrong - I'm a lawyer, not an anthropologist) that you would see a greater range of athleticism in a genetically diverse population than you would in a less genetically diverse population. Therefore, a greater incidence of high athletic ability. And if, over the centuries, increased athleticism gave an evolutionary advantage, natural selection would tend to skew this characteristic toward the higher end.

I'd be interested in what someone who actually has experience in anthropology thinks about this - in other words, where are the holes in my theory?

One of the things that comes to mind is that if this is the case, racial segregation actually does a great disservice to the less genetically diverse populations.

Another is to think of the great talents and abilities of African people who are repressed by the third-world conditions and oppressive governments in Africa. What a great waste of human resources and talent - people who could be great blessings to the rest of the world.

Just some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head this evening.

I'm very impressed by this post. You've hit on several truisms here that I'll pick out.

1. Genetic diversity at the center of a population is higher than on the periphery.
2. Migration tends to involve peripheral groups more so than central ones.
3. Regardless, any act of separating oneself from a large group is by definition limiting genetic diversity.

These factors combine to cause a phenomenon known as "founder effect". This causes major problems when it happens among small, insular populations (Ashkenazi Jews, early Quebecois), but even among relatively large groups it results in a lot of genetic variation being lost. Given enough time, this geographical separation with limited gene pool can eventually lead to speciation.

In humans, after the original separation happened it seems that there was enough gene flow across different populations that the differences between populations didn't get very high over the short amount of time since then.

Recent papers have confirmed that all of human variation is largely (>95% as I recall) a subset of African variation. Therefore, with very few exceptions, any gene that you have is also present in Africa.

It might not be quite as simple as all that, as there are certain African populations that were much more active even over the last 10,000 years and therefore might have had stronger selective pressure for athleticism while European populations had become (and probably always were, to a degree) more sedentary. This is hard to find evidence for as it's pretty subtle.

So Socalcoug pretty much nailed it. African populations, in theory, and in the absence of sociological factors, will tend to have a greater percentage of great athletes, and also a greater percentage of poor ones. Since what we watch on TV is the result of all the unexceptional athletes being filtered out, it makes sense that those of recent African decent would be over-represented. Add in a cultural love for basketball and football, and you're likely to find a lot of black representation in those sports.

The point that I like to make is that racism is based on knowing someone's skin color and drawing conclusions from it about their behavior or abilities. Given a large enough body of data, a geneticist today can tell from your genes what color your skin is, but, going the opposite direction, he/she can't tell you whether you will possess any particular gene based on only your skin color. Drawing conclusions about someone based on their skin color therefore remains as ever unjustifiable.

It is not at all clear in my mind whether "race" is a valid biological term when applied to humans (I tend to think it isn't). Once one understands the strong selective pressures on skin color, it really doesn't make sense to use that as a method of judging. If a bunch of us white folk all hopped on a plane and moved to equatorial Africa and started a paleolithic-style village, our descendants would all have black skin too (in the event that they survived) given enough generations.

[beefytee]

Saying that africans are faster is an oversimplification itself.

There are select regions of africa (West-africa) that seem to have better sprinters and there are regions that seem to produce the good marathon runners (Kenya-Ethopia).

[Hallelujah]

Just to be clear. I think the term "race" is simply a label we put on the end product of tens of thousands of years of human evolution, to describe recognizable groups of people according to visible characteristics, who until the last 200 years were largely separated by distance and natural barriers.

I don't subscribe to what I believe is a very misguided opinion that one "race" is somehow "better" than another.

I saw a post over on CB that was talking about BYU's inability to recruit speed - i.e., black athletes.

I recall having a discussion with a co-worker years ago where he vigorously denied any difference in the physiology of white people and black people that result in black people tending to be faster sprinters than white people. I told him that I ran track in high school, and all the sprinters were black. I think both the black guys and the white guys acknowledged that generality (yeah, there were some exceptions).

This guy insisted that the difference was entirely learned - white kids weren't expected to be fast runners, and so they focused on other things.

Whether his position was correct or not, his logic was very flawed. I do know that pro sports which rely heavily on athleticism seem to have a higher percentage of black athletes than are in the normal population.

I was reading something recently - some article about evolving theories of the migration of early humans. The prevailing theory is that humans originated in Africa, and spread out to Europe and Asia in a few distinct migrations. Apparently, the way the migrations happened (relatively small groups over a small period of time) affected the genetic diversity of those migrating groups. Because they were smaller groups who were likely already substantially interrelated, their genetic diversity was much lower than that of the human population as a whole.

The result is that there is a significantly greater amount of genetic diversity among the people of Africa than there is among any other "race" around the world.

Suburban white people see black people primarily in the context of sports. Therefore, athleticism is the most highly visible aspect of the black people that the non-urban population sees. Therefore, what we tend to see as an increased athleticism is just the most visible manifestation of the genetic diversity of Africans. In other words, in a less genetically diverse group, you would expect to see far more similarity in ability and characteristic than you would in a genetically diverse population. In terms of athleticism, I would think (I could be wrong - I'm a lawyer, not an anthropologist) that you would see a greater range of athleticism in a genetically diverse population than you would in a less genetically diverse population. Therefore, a greater incidence of high athletic ability. And if, over the centuries, increased athleticism gave an evolutionary advantage, natural selection would tend to skew this characteristic toward the higher end.

I'd be interested in what someone who actually has experience in anthropology thinks about this - in other words, where are the holes in my theory?

One of the things that comes to mind is that if this is the case, racial segregation actually does a great disservice to the less genetically diverse populations.

Another is to think of the great talents and abilities of African people who are repressed by the third-world conditions and oppressive governments in Africa. What a great waste of human resources and talent - people who could be great blessings to the rest of the world.

Just some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head this evening.

Don't talk physical differences between blacks and whites and why blacks may be able to run faster, you'll be labeled a racist. Careful.

[SoCalCoug]

So Socalcoug pretty much nailed it.

That's what she said!

[SoCalCoug]

Saying that africans are faster is an oversimplification itself.

There are select regions of africa (West-africa) that seem to have better sprinters and there are regions that seem to produce the good marathon runners (Kenya-Ethopia).

This is very consistent with the theory that the human population in Africa has greater genetic diversity than the populations outside of Africa. Among Africans, you should be able to find a greater percentage of people who excel at virtually everything than you would find in the outside populations.

I expect that if the splinter groups had particular genetic makeups that gave them particular genetic strengths, they might, as a population, have been toward one side of the bell curve in that aspect, but I expect over time, those genetic characteristics may have migrated back toward the mean.

[Solon]

There's some really interesting literature on so-called "scientific racism" in sports during the 19th and early 20th centuries. For a long time, scientists were convinced that white athletes were naturally superior. The best known manifestation of this was the 1936 Olympics, Nazi propaganda, Jesse Owens, etc. But there's a pretty interesting episode that happened in the USA in 1904 during the St. Louis Olympic Games. At those games, held in conjunction with the World Fair, an anthropologist named William McGee sponsored a set of "tribal games" that he called "Anthropology Days", intended to uncover the raw athleticism of "primitive" or "uncivilized" (non-western) peoples and demonstrate how well these natural athletes would do in Olympic sports if only they received proper (western) athletic coaching and training.

So, the organizers brought in Moros from the Philippines, African Pygmys, Native Americans, "Negritos" from Africa, etc. to compete. Geronimo himself even attended. however, the final results were really disappointing, with the official report noting that "the representatives of the savage and uncivilized tribes proved themselves inferior athletes, greatly overrated." (See M. Dyreson, Making the American Team (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 80-85 for more information.)

Today, many people want to anoint black athletes as having natural advantages (as opposed to the white folks who worked harder and smarter).

It's a pretty interesting topic - historically.

[SoCalCoug]

To me, the great irony is that those who champion segregation (unless they are Africans) are only hurting their own segregated population.

You see the effect of a lack of genetic diversity in crops. (Again, another little article I read yesterday) I think it's in the Pacific Northwest, where 85% of the wheat grown as crops is of only three varieties. Because of the lack of genetic diversity, if a disease or pest hit these crops, and one or two of the varieties of wheat were genetically susceptible to the disease, it could have a devastating effect on the crop in that area.

However, with more genetic diversity, the chances of a substantial effect by a single disease or pest is greatly reduced.

Now, the lack of genetic diversity in crops has a benefit, as well as a risk, in that these varieties may be particularly high-yielding or more hardy than most others. So, high-risk, high reward.

I would think in a large population, over a large, diverse area (such as the whole world for humans), genetic diversity is a huge benefit to the population.

It seems that the greatest benefit to people would be not to foster segregation between "races" but to encourage integration.

[woot]

It also seems that Americans are likely to have a skewed perspective on race relations due to how the representative of non-European populations tend to arrive here. The African population is largely represented by descendants of slaves, who were likely to be more physically capable than average (I'm not sure how strictly the slave trade selected the best physical specimens, but it happened to some degree). Similarly, the Asian populations are often represented here by those who are smart enough to come over for purposes of receiving university education.

These stereotypes do often hold up when we look at Olympic results and international test scores, but I think the differences tend to be exaggerated here in the states.

[Solon]

(I'm not sure how strictly the slave trade selected the best physical specimens, but it happened to some degree).

Good points, woot. For the above point, I'm sure the African slaves who managed to survive capture and the difficult journey to the Americas were helped by physical characteristics. Also, disease in West Africa was (is) constantly removing weaker people (all this is from the historian's point-of-view, so take it for what it's worth).

[Indy Coug]

Last year, I looked up the top 50 100M sprinters in the world and found that the overwhelming majority are of West African descent, even when most of them were running for the US, Caribbean nations, Europe or elsewhere.

I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that there is a strong genetic reason why the "tail" of the distribution for Western Africans is bigger/longer than for other subpopulations.

Some human subpopulations are taller, darker, have curlier hair, have bigger noses and so forth than other subpopulations, so there's no reason to believe that there isn't a group that is inherently faster than the others.

[woot]

Last year, I looked up the top 50 100M sprinters in the world and found that the overwhelming majority are of West African descent, even when most of them were running for the US, Caribbean nations, Europe or elsewhere.

I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that there is a strong genetic reason why the "tail" of the distribution for Western Africans is bigger/longer than for other subpopulations.

Some human subpopulations are taller, darker, have curlier hair, have bigger noses and so forth than other subpopulations, so there's no reason to believe that there isn't a group that is inherently faster than the others.

Well, I would agree with everything up until the last clause. It could be true that West Africans are inherently faster, but all we know is that their right tail tends to be farther to the right. It doesn't mean that their left tail isn't farther to the left too. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if some selective advantage to sprinting had made West African populations simply faster than others, but I don't think we can say that quite yet. It does seem that East African populations might have had a selective advantage to long-distance running in that they practiced persistence hunting, but even then we don't know how common this was and if it actually would have offered a reproductive advantage.

Still, I don't have any problem acknowledging population differences. If anything, I think it reinforces my idea that "racial" categories are invalid.

[CardiacCoug]

I don't have much to add, but this is a very interesting thread.

One thing I have always thought pretty silly is that physicians over the past few decades have tended to focus on race issues when prescribing anti-hypertensive medications. There was a conventional wisdom that was passed down that African Americans benefited from calcium channel blockers and diuretics, while people of European ancestry benefit more from beta blockers and ACE inhibitors.

Thankfully, I think prescribing based on race is gradually being stopped. There is a medication called BiDil that is only approved in African Americans with heart failure. But I think the fact (as mentioned above) that race is not a genetic entity casts doubt on the validity of this type of race-specific indication for a medication.