Why English speakers dominate sprinting events
isteve.blogspot.com
isteve.blogspot.com
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.
Maybe there were faster, scarier predators around in that area.
"Runners of West African descent—which includes Jamaicans as well as most African-Americans—seem to be built for speed: In 2004, they held all but five of the 500 best times in the 100-meter dash. (East Africans, such as Kenyans and Ethiopians, rule the long-distance field.) Several biological factors may be coming into play here. One study conducted in Quebec in the 1980s found that black West African students had significantly higher amounts of "fast-twitch" muscle fibers—the kind that are responsible for short, explosive bursts of action—than white French Canadians did. (So far, there is no evidence that even extensive training can turn slow-twitch muscles into fast-twitch ones, though moving in the other direction is possible.)"
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.
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.
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.
I agree in general though.
Keep it civil.
"West Africa" is huge and diverse. What part of west africa are you talking about?
Most of west africa does not have the geography you describe.
Most west african warfare was not waged with machetes. Can you give ONE example or reference for this? There are plenty of african history books which talk about west african archers, spears, shields, canoes and calvary, but I've never seen one about machete raids.
The world class sprinters are all from the USA or Caribbean. I.e. descended from people brought over as slaves. The slave trade went out of the west african coast, but the people who were sold into slavery were usually from somewhere else - often in the middle.
edit: ugh, I just read the article. I don't like deleting my own posts, so I won't. But i'm a bit embarrassed I responded to this.
- West Africa maybe huge, but it's not diverse. The entire western coast of Africa is one of the few places in the world where a major ocean runs on the east-west line and not on the north-south line. What this means geographically is that the coast has almost the same temperature and almost the same geography. Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, they all have almost identical landscape.
- West African warfare has always been with machetes. West Africans use bows and arrows, but the arrows are very small, and the bows have a different form from the european bows. The bows are smaller and lot more arched. The arrows have also been traditionally poisoned tipped.
- You can't fight a war using a canoe in a West African river. The vegetation is too thick for this to make any sense.
- Calvary? Are you kidding me? Horses are the worst form of transportation in a rain forest.
- Shields? No. Maybe light shields, but I'd find that a bit suprisng, because I've never seen any evidence of shield use in West Africa in all my travels. Think about it - what use is a shield? A shield is useful against sword-fighters or javelin throwsers, but it's pointless in very close range. And jungle warfare is either sneak-attack (like shooting poison arrows) or it's close range fighting
- Machetes have long been the weapon of choice in West Africa for as long as I know, there is a long tradition of sheath making, there are many rituals involving machetes. Now, IF you can prove that the weapon of choice for West Africans is not the machete, then back it up with links
- The people sold into slavery were from a wide variety of places, but usually from the rain forest. If you wish to read some anectdodes about this, then please read the book by Mungo Park
West Africa is a special interest of mine, so if you really feel that you are in posession of facts that are more accurate than mine, then please do back it up.
If I am wrong, I will gratefully admit it, because it will give me the opportunity to learn something new.
And a world class zimbabwean kung fu master could exist.
Not cool.
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).
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"...
...
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 ]
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.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280676
mentioning it. My poor attempt at humour, heh. I forgot some exclamation marks too!