In your second comment you misunderstand genetic diversity; the amount of genetic variation in populations is extremely well-studied, and numerous high-quality and rigorous studies have shown that there is simply a much, much higher level of genetic diversity in African populations (and in African-Americans) than in non-African populations – which makes sense, since those populations came out of Africa and represent, for the most part, a subset of the original variation.

Your final comment, that social factors most likely drive black Americans to try harder to succeed in sports are, I think, spot-on and I don’t disagree; this article was meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, which was hopefully clear from the title. Of course I think that social factors in general trump the genetic factors.

1) Black people in the United States went under selective pressure by the slave owners and all the painful experience associated with slavery. The slave owners would naturally prefer to buy big, strong slaves; moreover it is only these who could survive the gruelling trip from africa to the atlantic without any basic necessities. This could be a much more relevant explanation about black people’s superiority in athletics in North America, at any rate; more relevant, at least, than the simple argument of “genetic diversity” which is problematic.

2) The flow of populations has not been documented well enough to show what is diverse and what isn’t. For example, while Africa may contain many diverse ethnic groups, in order for each individual to have a lot of diversity the crucial component you need to analyze is how much FLOW of genes there were between ethnic groups–otherwise, you could end up having a number of ethnic groups with “bottlenecks” as you said. And arguably there was much more genetic flow in areas like India and the Middle East, which for about 5000 years were at the centre of trade routes between Europe, China, and Africa, and which saw massive population movements and intermixing. So if you talk about genetic diversity you need to actually look at how much diversity each individual of a nation has, not how many ethnic groups there are in a continent. And if it is true indeed that Arabs, for example, have more genetic diversity than some successful Africans, then genetic diversity does not always equal to superiority in sports; otherwise, we would have Arabic athletes winning everything.

3) This article does not consider social reasons behind aptitude; sociology shows, over and over again, that nurture plays a great role in personal aptitudes and most people do intend fall within the “average” bell curve of aptitudes of all kinds in all continents. So what kind of social factors could contribute to black people being more successful in terms of sports? Well, sports are a way to shine for people who have no opportunity, and since the capitalist and racist structures in the world do not give black people intellectual opportunity, they only have a chance to practice sports. Statistically speaking, then, if you take an entire race and give it nothing to do but exercise the body and playing skills, you will get more champions out of that race. All the other races are in more privileged positions and they are busy practicing skills that are more likely to earn them steady jobs–like studying for university, for example. If you were to even the playing field in “violin-playing” you would probably not get a complete superiority of black people in that field too; because if violin-playing and every other bourgeois activity was made accessible, far fewer black people would be practising sports, and you would have a sharp decline in black athletes; you would, then, probably have an even number of all the races in all activities. Hopefully, we can reach that future one day.

well…the power of selection relative to random genetic drift decreases as the population size decreases. ie, it isn’t like the probability of selection via fixation, 2 X selection coefficient, for an advantageous allele, decreases as you scale effective pop size up or down. but, the probablity of fixation for neutrality does increase a lot (1/(2 X effective pop). in other words, keep selection constant, but shift drift.

What this means is if we consider any particular trait that confers some freakish ability, we should expect to find Africans with that freakish ability. This will increase further if we consider multi-factoral traits, since it’s far more likely that we’ll find the coincidence of two alleles in an African population than we will in an Out of Africa one.

hm. well, depends on if it is neutral, right? if being super pale is “freakish ability,” well, africans are highly constrained don loci like MC1R. europeans have 30 loci > 1%.

This will increase further if we consider multi-factoral traits, since it’s far more likely that we’ll find the coincidence of two alleles in an African population than we will in an Out of Africa one.

well, if it is a totally random variable…but selection can drive the mean frequency of an allele over and make the variable…less random, so to speak diversity is good, ie variance, but if you shift the median on a normal over then you get LOTS more on one particular tail, right?

As a final note, remember this: marry someone as genetically distant from you as possible. Can’t hurt.

might, actually  (i think this is a exception to the rule, nevertheless, the genome is a big sample space) 

Posted by razib

enjoying head-to-head versus solo competition – including how you see what your job is when playing a group sport – is another aspect.

regarding “out of africa”: article and discussion . 

Posted by david

http://www.kenanmalik.com/reviews/entine_taboo.html 

Posted by Rohin

Posted by Saurav

Posted by david

ethnicity is used to define borders among the music traditions in the americas; tracing the growth of these traditions and their ethnic affiliation is probably more complicated than determining human ancestry because the history can be forgotten to the point that in some places there is music that is “traditional” and nobody has any idea how it got there or what purpose it served way-when. (this is true of reggae.) however throughout the americas there is white music, black music, native music, and a variety of popular mixtures. south asian blends are particularly popular and predate bhangra – in this hemisphere they started in trinidad.

this is an interesting nature-nurture question. “white folks can’t dance” is the question. the difference in what the community considers high music, and how that high music is structured, is such a big difference and exposure starts so early that if you wanted you could make stupid arguments that a sense of rhythm is inherited.

personally i think nature/nurture needs a third leg so it can stand on its own: plunder. the kid is wired to steal cultural material up to and beyond the point where it can live on its own without getting kicked out of society (because in society you can share labor, get laid, learn jokes, and eat better food, and the divine forces want us to have these things).

anyway i would make it a third category because nature and nurture make it sound like the line should be drawn between fully-functioning adults making sensible choices, or cockfighting.

as said the divisions of groups in the united states – white, black, hispanic, asian, and other – are stupid and bear little more than superficial scrutiny. within each of those are divisions larger than among them. most of the differences can be filed under differences in religious practice. dividing us by catholic, protestant, muslim, jew, buddhist, hindu and other makes much more sense.

i guess i’m throwing this in to help eliminate a few “not genetic” items from the list. 

Posted by david