yeah so a very informative thread just got deleted and in summary this one of the things that went down.
Quinny said this to me-
"You would be criticized if you said that "African Americans" have had
success in track and field because they are "African Americans". Race
has nothing to do with it, physique does. If you can't make that
distinction, you need to do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up and
not pretend like you know anything about "race". I as well as pretty much every other
person in this thread can see though your thinly disguised
incompetence. Now run along and play in traffic you brainless limp dick
adolescent."
he also repeated himself and said
"that skin color has no correlation to athleticism. If it did,
sports worldwide would be dominated by a specific race. They are not.
It has more to do with demographics than anything...the environment the
person grew up with, the kind of education they received, and the kind
of resources that they had available. For every black "super athlete"
you could count, there would be far more that would not "make the cut."
You could make a case for cultural breeding, but that has little or
nothing to do with race. Look at it on the basic level of DNA. A gene
the dictates skin color has no influence whatsoever structural build of
the body. That is why you are wrong.
You can post all the YouTube links you want, and you can cough up
all the uncreative insults you like, but you cant give my a shred of
scientific proof that any of your hypotheses are correct."
I replied with this scientific paper which explains something that nobody on this website seems to understand that there are real physical differences between different races of people.
July 30, 2004
Peering Under the Hood of Africa's Runners
By Constance Holden
Kenyans
dominate endurance running, and West Africans excel as sprinters. With
a physiological explanation in hand, researchers are now probing the
genetics of this geographic mastery In 1968, a Kenyan runner named Kip
Keino emerged as a shining star of the Mexico City summer Olympics,
setting a world record in the 1500-meter race. Year after year Keino's
success has been followed by equally dazzling feats by his compatriots:
Kenyan men now hold world records in the 3000-meter track race, the
15-, 20-, and 25-kilometer road races, the half-marathon, and the
marathon. Kenyan men have won 13 of the last 14 Boston marathons.
Kenyan women are also rising fast: They hold half of the top 10
marathon times and world records in 20-, 25-, and 30-km track races.
What is even more remarkable is that most of these athletes come from a
small area in Kenya's Rift Valley, from a group of tribes called the
Kalenjin who number little more than 3 million people.
Theories abound about what Kenya-born writer and runner John Manners
calls "the greatest geographical concentration of achievement in the
annals of sport." Is it the high altitude that fosters big lungs and
efficient oxygen use? Is it their maize-based diet? Or the fact that
many children run to school? A grueling training regimen, perhaps? Such
questions have inspired a handful of researchers to try to define the
Kenyan magic. Meanwhile, scientists are unraveling why athletes whose
ancestors come from the other side of the continent&West
Africa—have emerged as the world's fastest sprinters.
Fuel economy
Leading the charge in penetrating the Kenyan mystique has been Bengt
Saltin, a Swedish physiologist who heads the Copenhagen Muscle Research
Centre in Denmark. In the 1990s, Saltin's group began comparing Kenyan
and Scandinavian runners by scrutinizing their physiological makeups
and assessing the "trainability" of novice runners in both countries.
A
decade later, the scientists have ruled out most of the popular
explanations for Kenyans' domination of running. Altitude is not the
key to the riddle, they have found, because there's no difference
between Kenyans and Scandinavians in their capacity to consume oxygen.
And the Kenyan diet is on the low side for essential amino acids and
some vitamins as well as fat, says Dirk Christensen of the Copenhagen
center: "In spite of the diet, they perform at high level." The
running-to-school hypothesis was demolished as well: Kenyan children
aren't any more physically active than their Danish peers. Do Kenyans
try harder? The researchers found that the Danes actually pushed
themselves harder on a treadmill test, reaching higher maximum heart
rates.
An important clue is the
ability of Kenyans to resist fatigue longer. Lactate, generated by
tired, oxygen- deprived muscles, accumulates more slowly in their
blood. Comparisons of lactate levels have suggested to Saltin's group
that Kenyan runners squeeze about 10% more mileage from the same oxygen
intake than Europeans can.
Just as
more aerodynamic cars get better gas mileage, the Kenyan build helps
explain their fuel efficiency. A recent British TV documentary
described the Kalenjin as possessing "birdlike legs, very long levers
that are very, very thin [on which they] bounce and skip" along.
Saltin's
group has quantified this observation. Compared with Danes, the thinner
calves of Kenyans have, on average, 400 grams less flesh in each lower
leg. The farther a weight is from the center of gravity, the more
energy it takes to move it. Fifty grams added to the ankle will
increase oxygen consumption by 1%, Saltin's team calculates. For the
Kenyans, that translates into an 8% energy savings to run a kilometer.
"We have solved the main problem," declares Henrik Larsen of the
Copenhagen center. "Kenyans are more efficient because it takes less
energy to swing their limbs." Other scientists say the jury is still
out on the Kenyan question. But "I think Saltin is probably the most
correct that anyone is at the moment," says physiologist Kathryn
Myburgh of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, who is
exploring the role of Kenyans' training.
However,
slim lower legs are not the whole story. Kenyan runners also have a
higher concentration of an enzyme in skeletal muscle that spurs high
lactate turnover and low lactate production. Saltin says that this
results in an "extraordinarily high" capacity for fatty acid oxidation,
which helps wring more energy out of the muscles' biochemical
reactions. Because intense training alters the body's biochemistry,
Saltin says that he can't say for sure whether the ezyme levels are due
to genes or training. But he adds, "I think it's genetic." Research in
South Africa jibes with the Copenhagen group's findings.
A
team led by exercise physiologist Adele Weston of the University of
Sydney, Australia, compared black South Africans, whose running
strengths are similar to those of Kenyans, with white runners. The two
groups had similar VO2 max values—that is, when putting out maximum
effort, they used up the same amount of oxygen per kilogram of body
weight per minute. But the black runners were more efficient in their
oxygen consumption, lasting on a treadmill at maximum speed for twice
as long as the whites. As with the Kenyans, the black South African
runners accumulated less lactate and had higher levels of key muscle
enzymes.
A little more twitchy
Whereas
East Africans dominate long-distance running, West Africans have surged
to the fore in short-distance events. Little research has been done on
West Africans, but there's powerful circumstantial evidence for some
physical advantages, as presented by Jon Entine in his book "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It."
Athletes of primarily West African descent—which includes the majority
of U.S. blacks—hold all but six of the 500 best times in the 100-meter
race, "the purest measure of running speed," says Entine, whose book
set off a broad debate on the subject.
Various
studies have shown that West African athletes have denser bones, less
body fat, narrower hips, thicker thighs, longer legs, and lighter
calves than whites. But the differences between East and West Africans
are even more striking. The fabled Kenyan runners are small, thin, and
tend to weigh between 50 and 60 kilograms, whereas West African
athletes are taller and a good 30 kilograms heavier, says Timothy
Noakes, a prominent exercise physiologist and researcher at the
University of Cape Town.
The
differences don't stop with body shape; there is also evidence of a
difference in the types of muscle fibers that predominate. Scientists
have divided skeletal muscles into two basic groups depending on their
contractile speed: type I, or slow-twitch muscles, and type II,
fast-twitch muscles. There are two kinds of the latter: type IIa,
intermediate between fast and slow; and type IIb, which are
superfast-twitch. Endurance runners tend to have mostly type I fibers,
which have denser capillary networks and are packed with more
mitochondria. Sprinters, on the other hand, have mostly type II fibers,
which hold lots of sugar as well as enzymes that burn fuel in the
absence of oxygen. In the 1980s, Claude Bouchard's team at Quebec's
Laval University took needle biopsies from the thigh muscles of white
French Canadian and black West African students. They found that the
Africans averaged significantly more fast-twitch muscle
fibers—67.5%—than the French Canadians, who averaged 59%.
Endurance runners have up to 90% or more slow-twitch fibers, Saltin
reports. Bouchard, now at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge,
says his team looked at two enzymes that are markers for oxidative
metabolism and found higher activity of both in the West Africans,
meaning they could generate more ATP, the energy currency of the cell,
in the absence of oxygen. The study suggests that in West Africa there
may be a larger pool of people "with elevated levels of what it takes
to perform anaerobically at very high power output," says Bouchard.
Although
training can transform superfast-twitch type IIb fibers into the hybrid
type IIa, it is unlikely to cause slow- and fast-twitch fibers to
exchange identities. Myburgh says there is evidence that, with
extremely intensive long-distance training, fast IIa fibers can change
to slow type I fibers. So far, however, there is no evidence that
slow-twitch fibers can be turned into fast-twitch ones. As an athlete
puts on muscle mass through training, new fibers are not created, but
existing fibers become bigger.
Running ACEs
The
differences in physique and muscle makeup that underlie the dominance
of Kenyan endurance runners and West African sprinters doubtless have a
strong genetic component. But researchers are only just getting off the
starting mark in the search for genes that influence running
performance. Bouchard's group, for example, is collecting DNA samples
from 400 runners and other top endurance athletes from the United
States and Europe, but he says they haven't spotted any running genes
yet. There are a couple of intriguing possibilities, though. In 1999, a
team headed by Kathryn North of the Children's Hospital at Westmead in
Australia described two versions of a gene that affects production of
-actinin-3, a protein found only in fast-twitch muscles. They found the
less efficient version of the gene which results in poorer energy
conversion—in 18% of the members of a group of Caucasians.
In 2003, North's group reported in the—American Journal of Human
Genetics that only 6% of a group of sprinters had the gene defect; 26%
of endurance runners had it. The authors surmise that -actinin-3 helps
muscles generate "forceful contractions at high velocity."
Alejandro
Lucia Mulas of the European University in Madrid is taking DNA samples
from Eritrean runners to explore another candidate: different versions
of the gene for angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE). Lucia says the
less active version, or I allele, of this gene is associated with less
muscle, less fluid retention, and more relaxed blood vessels—which
would enhance oxygen uptake—and appears to be more prevalent in
endurance runners.
And in Scotland,
sports physiologist Yannis Pitsiladis has launched a major onslaught on
the Kenyans' secrets with the International Centre for East African
Running Science. Headquartered at the University of Glasgow, the
virtual center will bring together research on demography, diet, and
socioeconomic factors as well as genes. Pitsiladis says he has spent
the last 3 years in East Africa collecting DNA samples from their
"living legends" and now has DNA from 404 Kenyan and 113 Ethiopian
athletes. His team has found a higher prevalence of the I allele for
the ACE enzyme in male marathoners compared with men from the general
Ethiopian population. But Pitsiladis thinks his numbers may lack
significance given the variability of the trait in African populations.
"At the moment there is no evidence" that East Africans have a genetic
advantage in running, he says.
None of
the data negate the importance of cultural habits and training. But as
Entine quotes anthropologist and sports science expert Robert Malina,
who is retired from Michigan State University, "Differences among
athletes of elite caliber are so small that if you have an advantage
that might be genetically based ... it might be very, very
significant." Next month's Olympic games in Athens should demonstrate
yet again that West African runners are built for speed and Kenyans
built to endure.
Quinny said this to me-
"You would be criticized if you said that "African Americans" have had
success in track and field because they are "African Americans". Race
has nothing to do with it, physique does. If you can't make that
distinction, you need to do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up and
not pretend like you know anything about "race". I as well as pretty much every other
person in this thread can see though your thinly disguised
incompetence. Now run along and play in traffic you brainless limp dick
adolescent."
he also repeated himself and said
"that skin color has no correlation to athleticism. If it did,
sports worldwide would be dominated by a specific race. They are not.
It has more to do with demographics than anything...the environment the
person grew up with, the kind of education they received, and the kind
of resources that they had available. For every black "super athlete"
you could count, there would be far more that would not "make the cut."
You could make a case for cultural breeding, but that has little or
nothing to do with race. Look at it on the basic level of DNA. A gene
the dictates skin color has no influence whatsoever structural build of
the body. That is why you are wrong.
You can post all the YouTube links you want, and you can cough up
all the uncreative insults you like, but you cant give my a shred of
scientific proof that any of your hypotheses are correct."
I replied with this scientific paper which explains something that nobody on this website seems to understand that there are real physical differences between different races of people.
July 30, 2004
Peering Under the Hood of Africa's Runners
By Constance Holden
Kenyans
dominate endurance running, and West Africans excel as sprinters. With
a physiological explanation in hand, researchers are now probing the
genetics of this geographic mastery In 1968, a Kenyan runner named Kip
Keino emerged as a shining star of the Mexico City summer Olympics,
setting a world record in the 1500-meter race. Year after year Keino's
success has been followed by equally dazzling feats by his compatriots:
Kenyan men now hold world records in the 3000-meter track race, the
15-, 20-, and 25-kilometer road races, the half-marathon, and the
marathon. Kenyan men have won 13 of the last 14 Boston marathons.
Kenyan women are also rising fast: They hold half of the top 10
marathon times and world records in 20-, 25-, and 30-km track races.
What is even more remarkable is that most of these athletes come from a
small area in Kenya's Rift Valley, from a group of tribes called the
Kalenjin who number little more than 3 million people.
Theories abound about what Kenya-born writer and runner John Manners
calls "the greatest geographical concentration of achievement in the
annals of sport." Is it the high altitude that fosters big lungs and
efficient oxygen use? Is it their maize-based diet? Or the fact that
many children run to school? A grueling training regimen, perhaps? Such
questions have inspired a handful of researchers to try to define the
Kenyan magic. Meanwhile, scientists are unraveling why athletes whose
ancestors come from the other side of the continent&West
Africa—have emerged as the world's fastest sprinters.
Fuel economy
Leading the charge in penetrating the Kenyan mystique has been Bengt
Saltin, a Swedish physiologist who heads the Copenhagen Muscle Research
Centre in Denmark. In the 1990s, Saltin's group began comparing Kenyan
and Scandinavian runners by scrutinizing their physiological makeups
and assessing the "trainability" of novice runners in both countries.
A
decade later, the scientists have ruled out most of the popular
explanations for Kenyans' domination of running. Altitude is not the
key to the riddle, they have found, because there's no difference
between Kenyans and Scandinavians in their capacity to consume oxygen.
And the Kenyan diet is on the low side for essential amino acids and
some vitamins as well as fat, says Dirk Christensen of the Copenhagen
center: "In spite of the diet, they perform at high level." The
running-to-school hypothesis was demolished as well: Kenyan children
aren't any more physically active than their Danish peers. Do Kenyans
try harder? The researchers found that the Danes actually pushed
themselves harder on a treadmill test, reaching higher maximum heart
rates.
An important clue is the
ability of Kenyans to resist fatigue longer. Lactate, generated by
tired, oxygen- deprived muscles, accumulates more slowly in their
blood. Comparisons of lactate levels have suggested to Saltin's group
that Kenyan runners squeeze about 10% more mileage from the same oxygen
intake than Europeans can.
Just as
more aerodynamic cars get better gas mileage, the Kenyan build helps
explain their fuel efficiency. A recent British TV documentary
described the Kalenjin as possessing "birdlike legs, very long levers
that are very, very thin [on which they] bounce and skip" along.
Saltin's
group has quantified this observation. Compared with Danes, the thinner
calves of Kenyans have, on average, 400 grams less flesh in each lower
leg. The farther a weight is from the center of gravity, the more
energy it takes to move it. Fifty grams added to the ankle will
increase oxygen consumption by 1%, Saltin's team calculates. For the
Kenyans, that translates into an 8% energy savings to run a kilometer.
"We have solved the main problem," declares Henrik Larsen of the
Copenhagen center. "Kenyans are more efficient because it takes less
energy to swing their limbs." Other scientists say the jury is still
out on the Kenyan question. But "I think Saltin is probably the most
correct that anyone is at the moment," says physiologist Kathryn
Myburgh of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, who is
exploring the role of Kenyans' training.
However,
slim lower legs are not the whole story. Kenyan runners also have a
higher concentration of an enzyme in skeletal muscle that spurs high
lactate turnover and low lactate production. Saltin says that this
results in an "extraordinarily high" capacity for fatty acid oxidation,
which helps wring more energy out of the muscles' biochemical
reactions. Because intense training alters the body's biochemistry,
Saltin says that he can't say for sure whether the ezyme levels are due
to genes or training. But he adds, "I think it's genetic." Research in
South Africa jibes with the Copenhagen group's findings.
A
team led by exercise physiologist Adele Weston of the University of
Sydney, Australia, compared black South Africans, whose running
strengths are similar to those of Kenyans, with white runners. The two
groups had similar VO2 max values—that is, when putting out maximum
effort, they used up the same amount of oxygen per kilogram of body
weight per minute. But the black runners were more efficient in their
oxygen consumption, lasting on a treadmill at maximum speed for twice
as long as the whites. As with the Kenyans, the black South African
runners accumulated less lactate and had higher levels of key muscle
enzymes.
A little more twitchy
Whereas
East Africans dominate long-distance running, West Africans have surged
to the fore in short-distance events. Little research has been done on
West Africans, but there's powerful circumstantial evidence for some
physical advantages, as presented by Jon Entine in his book "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It."
Athletes of primarily West African descent—which includes the majority
of U.S. blacks—hold all but six of the 500 best times in the 100-meter
race, "the purest measure of running speed," says Entine, whose book
set off a broad debate on the subject.
Various
studies have shown that West African athletes have denser bones, less
body fat, narrower hips, thicker thighs, longer legs, and lighter
calves than whites. But the differences between East and West Africans
are even more striking. The fabled Kenyan runners are small, thin, and
tend to weigh between 50 and 60 kilograms, whereas West African
athletes are taller and a good 30 kilograms heavier, says Timothy
Noakes, a prominent exercise physiologist and researcher at the
University of Cape Town.
The
differences don't stop with body shape; there is also evidence of a
difference in the types of muscle fibers that predominate. Scientists
have divided skeletal muscles into two basic groups depending on their
contractile speed: type I, or slow-twitch muscles, and type II,
fast-twitch muscles. There are two kinds of the latter: type IIa,
intermediate between fast and slow; and type IIb, which are
superfast-twitch. Endurance runners tend to have mostly type I fibers,
which have denser capillary networks and are packed with more
mitochondria. Sprinters, on the other hand, have mostly type II fibers,
which hold lots of sugar as well as enzymes that burn fuel in the
absence of oxygen. In the 1980s, Claude Bouchard's team at Quebec's
Laval University took needle biopsies from the thigh muscles of white
French Canadian and black West African students. They found that the
Africans averaged significantly more fast-twitch muscle
fibers—67.5%—than the French Canadians, who averaged 59%.
Endurance runners have up to 90% or more slow-twitch fibers, Saltin
reports. Bouchard, now at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge,
says his team looked at two enzymes that are markers for oxidative
metabolism and found higher activity of both in the West Africans,
meaning they could generate more ATP, the energy currency of the cell,
in the absence of oxygen. The study suggests that in West Africa there
may be a larger pool of people "with elevated levels of what it takes
to perform anaerobically at very high power output," says Bouchard.
Although
training can transform superfast-twitch type IIb fibers into the hybrid
type IIa, it is unlikely to cause slow- and fast-twitch fibers to
exchange identities. Myburgh says there is evidence that, with
extremely intensive long-distance training, fast IIa fibers can change
to slow type I fibers. So far, however, there is no evidence that
slow-twitch fibers can be turned into fast-twitch ones. As an athlete
puts on muscle mass through training, new fibers are not created, but
existing fibers become bigger.
Running ACEs
The
differences in physique and muscle makeup that underlie the dominance
of Kenyan endurance runners and West African sprinters doubtless have a
strong genetic component. But researchers are only just getting off the
starting mark in the search for genes that influence running
performance. Bouchard's group, for example, is collecting DNA samples
from 400 runners and other top endurance athletes from the United
States and Europe, but he says they haven't spotted any running genes
yet. There are a couple of intriguing possibilities, though. In 1999, a
team headed by Kathryn North of the Children's Hospital at Westmead in
Australia described two versions of a gene that affects production of
-actinin-3, a protein found only in fast-twitch muscles. They found the
less efficient version of the gene which results in poorer energy
conversion—in 18% of the members of a group of Caucasians.
In 2003, North's group reported in the—American Journal of Human
Genetics that only 6% of a group of sprinters had the gene defect; 26%
of endurance runners had it. The authors surmise that -actinin-3 helps
muscles generate "forceful contractions at high velocity."
Alejandro
Lucia Mulas of the European University in Madrid is taking DNA samples
from Eritrean runners to explore another candidate: different versions
of the gene for angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE). Lucia says the
less active version, or I allele, of this gene is associated with less
muscle, less fluid retention, and more relaxed blood vessels—which
would enhance oxygen uptake—and appears to be more prevalent in
endurance runners.
And in Scotland,
sports physiologist Yannis Pitsiladis has launched a major onslaught on
the Kenyans' secrets with the International Centre for East African
Running Science. Headquartered at the University of Glasgow, the
virtual center will bring together research on demography, diet, and
socioeconomic factors as well as genes. Pitsiladis says he has spent
the last 3 years in East Africa collecting DNA samples from their
"living legends" and now has DNA from 404 Kenyan and 113 Ethiopian
athletes. His team has found a higher prevalence of the I allele for
the ACE enzyme in male marathoners compared with men from the general
Ethiopian population. But Pitsiladis thinks his numbers may lack
significance given the variability of the trait in African populations.
"At the moment there is no evidence" that East Africans have a genetic
advantage in running, he says.
None of
the data negate the importance of cultural habits and training. But as
Entine quotes anthropologist and sports science expert Robert Malina,
who is retired from Michigan State University, "Differences among
athletes of elite caliber are so small that if you have an advantage
that might be genetically based ... it might be very, very
significant." Next month's Olympic games in Athens should demonstrate
yet again that West African runners are built for speed and Kenyans
built to endure.
