The reason San Pedro de Macoris produces the most big league baseball players per capita even in baseball-crazed Dominican Republic is that it's just about the blackest city in the DR. Dominican baseball players in the MLB tend to be notably blacker than Dominicans in general.
San Pedro in the sugar cane belt and several generations ago, it had a big influx of blacks to cut cane, including from the West Indies. If they'd stayed home, they'd likely have focused on cricket. But DR's policies encouraged assimilation, so they took Spanish names and learned baseball. DR's sugar cane region is probably the biggest concentration of baseball-loving blacks in the world. (Cuba might compete if it were more open to development.)
In general, in the modern world, blacks don't like baseball all that much. Africans don't play baseball at all, nor do blacks in Europe. The English and French speaking countries of the Caribbean don't play baseball. African-Americans used to play baseball and regularly produced all-time greats like Satchel Paige and Willie Mays. They still produce greats like Mookie Betts, but their culture is little interested in baseball in this century. (E.g., the part-black Aaron Judge is the adopted son of a white couple.)
The exceptions are the Spanish speaking countries around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
In the baseball-loving Latin American countries, there's a clear correlation between race and likelihood of making the MLB, with blacks on top, whites in the middle, and Amerindians at the bottom (with all combinations following that basic pattern). Footspeed is one obvious reason for this racial pattern: blacks tend to be fastest.
For example, Mexicans loved baseball for at least a century, and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles turn out in vast numbers to root for the LA Dodgers. But, no Mexican has ever made it to Cooperstown. The greatest Mexican player was my all time favorite ballplayer, Fernando Valenzuela, but he never made it to the Hall of Fame. (He's a charter member of the Hall of the Really Good.) The Mexican scout who recruited Fernando and spent decades scouring Mexico for another prospect as promising explained that mestizo Mexicans just don't have long enough legs on average to make it to the top very often in baseball.
A comparison of the physiques of Fernando Valenzuela and young Elly de la Cruz from the sugar cane belt of the Dominican Republic might help you grasp these concepts better.
This is not to say that these are absolute rules, just patterns that are vividly clear to serious baseball fans.
In general, if you sincerely would like to learn enough about the race-sports question to be able contribute intelligently to it in 2025, I'd be happy to bring you up to speed.
At this point, however, you are just tossing out embarrassing turn of the century talking points. For example, I can recall watching the 2002 documentary "Spellbound" over 20 years ago with John Derbyshire and his small children and discussing the implications of Brahmin dominance of spelling bees for the nature-nurture debate.
You really need to educate yourself upon where the issues stand in 2025. Obviously, intelligent guys like Yglesias don't trust your dogmatism anymore. I realize you have deeply emotional views on this question, but, who knows, you are a high IQ guy, so maybe if you'd allow yourself to become less ignorant about sports and race, you might come up with an idea that would reassure Yglesias.
Its not because it is the “blackest” but the “relatively small slice of central West African ancestry” blackest. You should be less race obsessed, and more much narrower sub-population obsessed for sport-valent physiological genetics. Senegalese and Kenyans are so different it isn’t useful at all to call them both “Black” if that term is supposed to be descriptive of something deeper than skin color. A fun exercise to note physiological subpopulation differences. Look at news footage of West African vs East African vs SE Asian guerilla fighters posing with their guns and their shirts off. Presumably people are only training for war but the differences in physique are huge just from “doing war stuff” training.
True, but from the perspective of the New World, which seems relevant when writing about baseball, the black contribution to the baseball playing population is overwhelmingly from West Africa and/or the Bantu Expansion and is fairly homogeneous genetically, as David Reich has pointed out.
For example, among sub-Saharan blacks, there are regional differences in track distances at which they tend to be best, but the whole continental-scale race tends to be pretty good at running in general for biomechanical reasons.
Also, we really don't know what will turn up in the future. World class running in sub-Saharan Africa only goes back to an Ethiopian winning the Olympic marathon in 1960, so who knows what the future will show. For example, there is now a 17 year old sprint prodigy in Australia named Gout Gout who is ahead of Usain Bolt at that age. His parents are from South Sudan, probably Dinkas, a famously elongated Nilotic racial group not previously known for sprinting. So, the future is unwritten.
Anti-hereditarians also need to explain: why the black-white test gap is so large that the children of the very wealthiest Black households score at the level of the very poorest white households; why the test gap occurs in every single school and district in a way that does not at all correlate with racism (it's not bigger in more Republican schools; in fact the smallest gap is in Frisco, Texas); why the gap is so stubbornly resistant to every single form of intervention, etc. What exactly is the "structural racism" that makes the kids of the professional Black upper-middle-class score about the same as the kids of the white lower-middle-class, or the most educated Black adults score at the level of whites with GEDs?
Anyone who honestly looks at the data without priors (i.e. excluding virtually all progressives for whom this is a matter of religious dogma) can only conclude: well, I don't know what's going on here, but the chances that this is going to change anytime soon, or that some One Weird Trick policy is going to change it, are virtually nil. Hence the absolute totalitarian lunacy of the woke in attempting to push their agenda here.
From a Popperian point of view, the theory of heredity playing a substantial role in racial IQ gaps has the merit of being falsifiable. Thus, it's at risk of being falsified by new findings.
For example, hereditarians theorized a century ago that African-Americans with more white ancestry would average higher IQ scores. But as Margaret Mead astutely pointed out in 1926, early studies attempting to test this were pretty useless because it's hard to get an accurate sense of ancestry just from looking at people. She recommended trying to find a way to get subjects' genealogies or other ways to more accurately assess ancestry.
Now, of course, we finally do have a technique that would meet Dr. Mead's request: ancestry evaluation from DNA. Two studies were done using the impressive Philadelphia Neurodevelopment and Adolescent Brain Cognition Development databases, both with sample sizes around 10,000, and the hereditarian hypothesis survived both potentially fatal tests.
This doesn't mean the partial hereditarian hypothesis has been PROVEN, just that it wasn't disproven by two studies that had the potential to disprove it.
It's easy to come up with glib rationalizations for how these results could have been solely due to nurture rather than nature. But, you'll note that the Environment-Only extremists almost never subject their theory of 100% Nurture - 0% Nature to these kind of dramatic tests that might falsify their own theory.
The thing about the environmentalists citing discrimination as the cause of group differences is that it does not explain everything. Ashkenazi Jews have faced a ton of discrimination, pogroms, and a literal genocide within the last century and yet are massively overrepresented in cognitively demanding activities. It’s hard to think of a population that has historically faced more discrimination. Isn’t this likely genetic? What kind of X factor could explain the 10 point IQ gap?
Basketball is quite a different case than the other skills mentioned here. It implicates a broad set of physical abilities: strength, endurance, vision, and coordination. Plus, the interest in the sport is on a whole different level. Additionally, the rewards associated with being good at these more general skills are far greater and more accessible to the broad population than those associated with something like a chess, ping pong, or perhaps even something like long distance running, where we do have some evidence that certain physical trait do confer completive advantages (e.g. lower leg volume). The disparity that emerges is quite clearly emerging from a pool of aspirants with a very different demographic composition. This isn't the case for the other examples where there is an obvious correlation between the two.
My point here isn't to explain why the disparity exists-this is obviously difficult-, but it's to highlight why your counter examples will not appear germane to many or most people noticing this disparity.
Basketball success is enormously correlated with height, which is correlated both with nature and nurture. E.g., Spain has been basketball crazy for generations, but Spaniards used to be kind of hungry and short. But lately, Spain has produced giants like the 7 foot Gasol brothers. On the other hand, China has been basketball crazy for quite awhile too. It managed to produce the eugenically bred Yao Ming (his parents were centers on the national men's and women's teams and their coaches encouraged them to date for the good of Chinese basketball), but in general China's vast population hasn't yet made much of an impact on the NBA.
Yglesias points out that two out of the five best basketball players in the world are Balkans: 6'11 Jokic and 6'7" Doncic. Obviously, this has to do with people from the Dinaric Alps being approaching a standard deviation taller on average than the typical European. But, it's also quite plausible that superior nurture -- Balkan basketball coaches train their big men in guard skills -- plays a major role in this.
I’ve watched in person two adult basketball games in my life.
The second time there was one 6”9 player with an utterly non-athletic physique on the court. He couldn’t even really run, he would kind of skip when he needed to track back or move forward. Unsurprisingly he was very good in and around the basket because of his height.
I do think the European system is superior for developing talent than the American one. Luka Doncic was playing in the Euro League at 17 years old. Meanwhile the top American players that age are messing around in high school going against a lot of guys who will never even play d1.
Seeing the skills of Luka, Jokic, Wemby makes me think America is just doing a lot wrong when teaching our kids to play basketball
I think what makes it work is in Europe the professional teams have academies, which gives them incentive to scout and develop players.
By contrast the American AAU system is totally broken because the coaches have no incentive to develop players so they just tour them around the country and have them play way too much just so they can make money off them.
Ireland is an astonishingly strong Rugby nation, regularly ranked at #1 or #2 or thereabouts in the world over the past decade, despite a smallish population (c. 7 million on the island as a whole), whereas Wales and Scotland are not, despite having similarly small populations.
The reason is straightforward - an investment pipeline starting in schools through rugby academies and huge investment in players, teams and facilities. New Zealand is even more dominant in rugby, for similar reasons. If Wales and Scotland invested similarly over long periods of time, then there would be similar effects - these were big rugby nations in the past. It's not that there is some weird gene thing going on in Ireland that makes us very good at rolling mauls.
Height and pack weight are not the only variables in rugby. Scrum halves and fly halves are small - one of the current Ireland scrum halves, Craig Casey, halfback for Munster and Ireland, is 5'4" (165cm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Casey.
I don't know enough about Indonesian heights except to say that I'm sure they are a bell curve, and they'll have some taller people as well given the population of 281 million.
Per capita, the best rugby players in the world are massive Pacific Islanders, just as American Samoa produces more NFL players per capita than even Louisiana. Samoans and some other Islanders tend to be huge and surprisingly fast.
“But genetic differences in cognitive ability are even more implausible than genetic differences in spelling or ping pong, for an obvious reason: there are massive environmental effects that compete with a genetic hypothesis.” This is a non sequitur. Environmental effects on cognitive development do not preclude a significant genetic component. Environmental effects don’t “compete” with a genetic hypothesis; they are wholly consistent with one. The question is the magnitude of the effect of each.
One of the overlooked features of Olympics racing events is the tight span between getting the gold medal and landing in 4th place with no medal at all--or even finishing last in the final, 8th place.
Judging from the phenotype appearances, finalists of sub-Saharan African ancestry routinely sweep racing events at distances between 100m--400m.
In the 800 meter 2024 final, an Arab Algerian with "mostly white" features won the bronze medal--placing 31/100 of a second behind the gold medalist, a Kenyan. Black guy running for Canada got the silver. The difference between gold and silver? 1/100 of a second.
American whitey-appearing Bruce Hoppel landed in 4th place, 17/100 of a second behind the Algerian. Less than 1/5 of a second off the podium. 48/100 of a second behind the 1st place finisher. A half-second difference between the gold medal and 4th place--one deep breath--over a half-mile course.
That's just one sample event. I'd venture that some swimming events are even tighter.
Also worth noting: no intelligence test that I know of works in a way remotely similar to an Olympic race, measuring a single easily gauged metric factor (i.e., speed) to provide an unequivocal ranked result.
It would be interesting to learn how much paying top finishers in a classroom IQ test--and emphasizing training exercises, optimal nutrition and rest beforehand--might affect the score results, though.
I like to look at the earlier rounds of the Olympics, such as the first 2 or 3 rounds of the men's 100m dash, which produce the eight finalists in the race to be the world's fastest man. In the last 11 Olympics, going back through Los Angeles 1984, 87 of 88 finalists slots in the men's 100m have been filled by sprinters with at least one sub-Saharan African parent.
I'll point out that even though white guys have been doing well in mid-distance events lately, the long distance events 10k and up are still utterly dominated by East Africans.
It's often claimed that East Africans succeed in running because they have a "running culture", but this is never supported by any evidence, just assumed. Distance running is also very popular in Japan but they are a complete nonentity on the world stage. Not to mention that East Africans that live in Western countries are still very dominant.
All of Israel's best marathon runners are of East African descent despite them being a tiny portion of the overall population.
Mo Farah, the famous British 5k and 10k runner who dominated the Olympics and World Championships for a better part of a decade, is a Somali refugee.
American 1500m bronze medalist Yared Nuguse is a son of Ethiopian immigrants and didn't run until he was in high school.
I think it's pretty clear East Africans have genetic advantages in endurance and it's cope to argue otherwise
What no one here seems to understand is that cognitive abilities cannot be measured or compared in the same way as the physical capabilities of different human groups.
The clearest example would be comparing a man and a woman in terms of their cognitive and physical capacities.
Culture and organizations have an influence, but only to a certain extent
Whether the difference in IQ is caused by heredity or the environment it exists. As we correctly move away from unconstitutional DEI practices (I am looking at you Harvard) black numbers in the more highly paid professional job ranks will surely (and correctly) fall. We need to brace ourselves and society for this eventually.
The reason San Pedro de Macoris produces the most big league baseball players per capita even in baseball-crazed Dominican Republic is that it's just about the blackest city in the DR. Dominican baseball players in the MLB tend to be notably blacker than Dominicans in general.
San Pedro in the sugar cane belt and several generations ago, it had a big influx of blacks to cut cane, including from the West Indies. If they'd stayed home, they'd likely have focused on cricket. But DR's policies encouraged assimilation, so they took Spanish names and learned baseball. DR's sugar cane region is probably the biggest concentration of baseball-loving blacks in the world. (Cuba might compete if it were more open to development.)
In general, in the modern world, blacks don't like baseball all that much. Africans don't play baseball at all, nor do blacks in Europe. The English and French speaking countries of the Caribbean don't play baseball. African-Americans used to play baseball and regularly produced all-time greats like Satchel Paige and Willie Mays. They still produce greats like Mookie Betts, but their culture is little interested in baseball in this century. (E.g., the part-black Aaron Judge is the adopted son of a white couple.)
The exceptions are the Spanish speaking countries around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
In the baseball-loving Latin American countries, there's a clear correlation between race and likelihood of making the MLB, with blacks on top, whites in the middle, and Amerindians at the bottom (with all combinations following that basic pattern). Footspeed is one obvious reason for this racial pattern: blacks tend to be fastest.
For example, Mexicans loved baseball for at least a century, and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles turn out in vast numbers to root for the LA Dodgers. But, no Mexican has ever made it to Cooperstown. The greatest Mexican player was my all time favorite ballplayer, Fernando Valenzuela, but he never made it to the Hall of Fame. (He's a charter member of the Hall of the Really Good.) The Mexican scout who recruited Fernando and spent decades scouring Mexico for another prospect as promising explained that mestizo Mexicans just don't have long enough legs on average to make it to the top very often in baseball.
A comparison of the physiques of Fernando Valenzuela and young Elly de la Cruz from the sugar cane belt of the Dominican Republic might help you grasp these concepts better.
This is not to say that these are absolute rules, just patterns that are vividly clear to serious baseball fans.
In general, if you sincerely would like to learn enough about the race-sports question to be able contribute intelligently to it in 2025, I'd be happy to bring you up to speed.
At this point, however, you are just tossing out embarrassing turn of the century talking points. For example, I can recall watching the 2002 documentary "Spellbound" over 20 years ago with John Derbyshire and his small children and discussing the implications of Brahmin dominance of spelling bees for the nature-nurture debate.
You really need to educate yourself upon where the issues stand in 2025. Obviously, intelligent guys like Yglesias don't trust your dogmatism anymore. I realize you have deeply emotional views on this question, but, who knows, you are a high IQ guy, so maybe if you'd allow yourself to become less ignorant about sports and race, you might come up with an idea that would reassure Yglesias.
Its not because it is the “blackest” but the “relatively small slice of central West African ancestry” blackest. You should be less race obsessed, and more much narrower sub-population obsessed for sport-valent physiological genetics. Senegalese and Kenyans are so different it isn’t useful at all to call them both “Black” if that term is supposed to be descriptive of something deeper than skin color. A fun exercise to note physiological subpopulation differences. Look at news footage of West African vs East African vs SE Asian guerilla fighters posing with their guns and their shirts off. Presumably people are only training for war but the differences in physique are huge just from “doing war stuff” training.
True, but from the perspective of the New World, which seems relevant when writing about baseball, the black contribution to the baseball playing population is overwhelmingly from West Africa and/or the Bantu Expansion and is fairly homogeneous genetically, as David Reich has pointed out.
Just because national races are a thing doesn't mean continental races aren't. Some families are bigger and broader than others.
For example, among sub-Saharan blacks, there are regional differences in track distances at which they tend to be best, but the whole continental-scale race tends to be pretty good at running in general for biomechanical reasons.
Also, we really don't know what will turn up in the future. World class running in sub-Saharan Africa only goes back to an Ethiopian winning the Olympic marathon in 1960, so who knows what the future will show. For example, there is now a 17 year old sprint prodigy in Australia named Gout Gout who is ahead of Usain Bolt at that age. His parents are from South Sudan, probably Dinkas, a famously elongated Nilotic racial group not previously known for sprinting. So, the future is unwritten.
Environmentalists don't have much of a theory either.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/which-environmental-factors-explain
Anti-hereditarians also need to explain: why the black-white test gap is so large that the children of the very wealthiest Black households score at the level of the very poorest white households; why the test gap occurs in every single school and district in a way that does not at all correlate with racism (it's not bigger in more Republican schools; in fact the smallest gap is in Frisco, Texas); why the gap is so stubbornly resistant to every single form of intervention, etc. What exactly is the "structural racism" that makes the kids of the professional Black upper-middle-class score about the same as the kids of the white lower-middle-class, or the most educated Black adults score at the level of whites with GEDs?
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1645694888216780801/
Anyone who honestly looks at the data without priors (i.e. excluding virtually all progressives for whom this is a matter of religious dogma) can only conclude: well, I don't know what's going on here, but the chances that this is going to change anytime soon, or that some One Weird Trick policy is going to change it, are virtually nil. Hence the absolute totalitarian lunacy of the woke in attempting to push their agenda here.
From a Popperian point of view, the theory of heredity playing a substantial role in racial IQ gaps has the merit of being falsifiable. Thus, it's at risk of being falsified by new findings.
For example, hereditarians theorized a century ago that African-Americans with more white ancestry would average higher IQ scores. But as Margaret Mead astutely pointed out in 1926, early studies attempting to test this were pretty useless because it's hard to get an accurate sense of ancestry just from looking at people. She recommended trying to find a way to get subjects' genealogies or other ways to more accurately assess ancestry.
Now, of course, we finally do have a technique that would meet Dr. Mead's request: ancestry evaluation from DNA. Two studies were done using the impressive Philadelphia Neurodevelopment and Adolescent Brain Cognition Development databases, both with sample sizes around 10,000, and the hereditarian hypothesis survived both potentially fatal tests.
This doesn't mean the partial hereditarian hypothesis has been PROVEN, just that it wasn't disproven by two studies that had the potential to disprove it.
It's easy to come up with glib rationalizations for how these results could have been solely due to nurture rather than nature. But, you'll note that the Environment-Only extremists almost never subject their theory of 100% Nurture - 0% Nature to these kind of dramatic tests that might falsify their own theory.
The thing about the environmentalists citing discrimination as the cause of group differences is that it does not explain everything. Ashkenazi Jews have faced a ton of discrimination, pogroms, and a literal genocide within the last century and yet are massively overrepresented in cognitively demanding activities. It’s hard to think of a population that has historically faced more discrimination. Isn’t this likely genetic? What kind of X factor could explain the 10 point IQ gap?
Basketball is quite a different case than the other skills mentioned here. It implicates a broad set of physical abilities: strength, endurance, vision, and coordination. Plus, the interest in the sport is on a whole different level. Additionally, the rewards associated with being good at these more general skills are far greater and more accessible to the broad population than those associated with something like a chess, ping pong, or perhaps even something like long distance running, where we do have some evidence that certain physical trait do confer completive advantages (e.g. lower leg volume). The disparity that emerges is quite clearly emerging from a pool of aspirants with a very different demographic composition. This isn't the case for the other examples where there is an obvious correlation between the two.
My point here isn't to explain why the disparity exists-this is obviously difficult-, but it's to highlight why your counter examples will not appear germane to many or most people noticing this disparity.
Basketball success is enormously correlated with height, which is correlated both with nature and nurture. E.g., Spain has been basketball crazy for generations, but Spaniards used to be kind of hungry and short. But lately, Spain has produced giants like the 7 foot Gasol brothers. On the other hand, China has been basketball crazy for quite awhile too. It managed to produce the eugenically bred Yao Ming (his parents were centers on the national men's and women's teams and their coaches encouraged them to date for the good of Chinese basketball), but in general China's vast population hasn't yet made much of an impact on the NBA.
Yglesias points out that two out of the five best basketball players in the world are Balkans: 6'11 Jokic and 6'7" Doncic. Obviously, this has to do with people from the Dinaric Alps being approaching a standard deviation taller on average than the typical European. But, it's also quite plausible that superior nurture -- Balkan basketball coaches train their big men in guard skills -- plays a major role in this.
I’ve watched in person two adult basketball games in my life.
The second time there was one 6”9 player with an utterly non-athletic physique on the court. He couldn’t even really run, he would kind of skip when he needed to track back or move forward. Unsurprisingly he was very good in and around the basket because of his height.
This stuff isn’t so obvious on TV.
I do think the European system is superior for developing talent than the American one. Luka Doncic was playing in the Euro League at 17 years old. Meanwhile the top American players that age are messing around in high school going against a lot of guys who will never even play d1.
Seeing the skills of Luka, Jokic, Wemby makes me think America is just doing a lot wrong when teaching our kids to play basketball
We long ago should've separated serious athletics from academe. The club system is much more sensible, and much less corrupting of institutions.
I think what makes it work is in Europe the professional teams have academies, which gives them incentive to scout and develop players.
By contrast the American AAU system is totally broken because the coaches have no incentive to develop players so they just tour them around the country and have them play way too much just so they can make money off them.
Ireland is an astonishingly strong Rugby nation, regularly ranked at #1 or #2 or thereabouts in the world over the past decade, despite a smallish population (c. 7 million on the island as a whole), whereas Wales and Scotland are not, despite having similarly small populations.
The reason is straightforward - an investment pipeline starting in schools through rugby academies and huge investment in players, teams and facilities. New Zealand is even more dominant in rugby, for similar reasons. If Wales and Scotland invested similarly over long periods of time, then there would be similar effects - these were big rugby nations in the past. It's not that there is some weird gene thing going on in Ireland that makes us very good at rolling mauls.
Golf in Ireland tells a similar tale (ahem).
How would giant Indonesia (population 281 million) do if it invested similar amounts in Rugby as little Ireland (population 5 million)?
Could it possibly be that Indonesians tend to prefer badminton to rugby because they aren't big enough to be competitive on the world stage at Rugby?
Height and pack weight are not the only variables in rugby. Scrum halves and fly halves are small - one of the current Ireland scrum halves, Craig Casey, halfback for Munster and Ireland, is 5'4" (165cm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Casey.
I don't know enough about Indonesian heights except to say that I'm sure they are a bell curve, and they'll have some taller people as well given the population of 281 million.
Interestingly, according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rugby_union_playing_countries
Indonesia has 16 rugby clubs with 830 registered players
Ireland has 221 rugby clubs with 157080 registered players
USA has 2588 rugby clubs with 126151 registered players
France whom we beat handily last year in the Six Nations, and beat us this year has 1798 clubs with 670847 registered players
2027 will see the Men's Rugby World Cup in Australia
I imagine we won't see either the USA or Indonesia in the final...!
Per capita, the best rugby players in the world are massive Pacific Islanders, just as American Samoa produces more NFL players per capita than even Louisiana. Samoans and some other Islanders tend to be huge and surprisingly fast.
So, what are the other sports favoring big men besides rugby at which Indonesia is outstanding? Basketball? Sumo wrestling?
The Irish population has sufficient phenotypical diversity to produce players who are useful in all positions in rugby.
The Indonesian population, I suspect, does not.
A very good coaching system - which Ireland has - only produces results if you have the right raw materials.
“But genetic differences in cognitive ability are even more implausible than genetic differences in spelling or ping pong, for an obvious reason: there are massive environmental effects that compete with a genetic hypothesis.” This is a non sequitur. Environmental effects on cognitive development do not preclude a significant genetic component. Environmental effects don’t “compete” with a genetic hypothesis; they are wholly consistent with one. The question is the magnitude of the effect of each.
One of the overlooked features of Olympics racing events is the tight span between getting the gold medal and landing in 4th place with no medal at all--or even finishing last in the final, 8th place.
Judging from the phenotype appearances, finalists of sub-Saharan African ancestry routinely sweep racing events at distances between 100m--400m.
In the 800 meter 2024 final, an Arab Algerian with "mostly white" features won the bronze medal--placing 31/100 of a second behind the gold medalist, a Kenyan. Black guy running for Canada got the silver. The difference between gold and silver? 1/100 of a second.
American whitey-appearing Bruce Hoppel landed in 4th place, 17/100 of a second behind the Algerian. Less than 1/5 of a second off the podium. 48/100 of a second behind the 1st place finisher. A half-second difference between the gold medal and 4th place--one deep breath--over a half-mile course.
https://www.olympics.com/en/olympic-games/paris-2024/results/athletics/men-800m
That's just one sample event. I'd venture that some swimming events are even tighter.
Also worth noting: no intelligence test that I know of works in a way remotely similar to an Olympic race, measuring a single easily gauged metric factor (i.e., speed) to provide an unequivocal ranked result.
It would be interesting to learn how much paying top finishers in a classroom IQ test--and emphasizing training exercises, optimal nutrition and rest beforehand--might affect the score results, though.
I like to look at the earlier rounds of the Olympics, such as the first 2 or 3 rounds of the men's 100m dash, which produce the eight finalists in the race to be the world's fastest man. In the last 11 Olympics, going back through Los Angeles 1984, 87 of 88 finalists slots in the men's 100m have been filled by sprinters with at least one sub-Saharan African parent.
87 out of 88 is pretty amazing, no?
I'll point out that even though white guys have been doing well in mid-distance events lately, the long distance events 10k and up are still utterly dominated by East Africans.
It's often claimed that East Africans succeed in running because they have a "running culture", but this is never supported by any evidence, just assumed. Distance running is also very popular in Japan but they are a complete nonentity on the world stage. Not to mention that East Africans that live in Western countries are still very dominant.
All of Israel's best marathon runners are of East African descent despite them being a tiny portion of the overall population.
Mo Farah, the famous British 5k and 10k runner who dominated the Olympics and World Championships for a better part of a decade, is a Somali refugee.
American 1500m bronze medalist Yared Nuguse is a son of Ethiopian immigrants and didn't run until he was in high school.
I think it's pretty clear East Africans have genetic advantages in endurance and it's cope to argue otherwise
About 18 years ago, I looked up the top 250 high school cross-country runners in the US. As I recall, 9% were of Eastern African immigrant stock.
What no one here seems to understand is that cognitive abilities cannot be measured or compared in the same way as the physical capabilities of different human groups.
The clearest example would be comparing a man and a woman in terms of their cognitive and physical capacities.
Culture and organizations have an influence, but only to a certain extent
https://open.substack.com/pub/birbantum/p/the-real-issue-with-the-thermian?r=36m69v&selection=897938ef-5a5d-4d9f-91c0-294ddf6761e6&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web
It is not true that most top chess players are from the former society union. See www.2700chess.com.
Ideology knocks 10 IQ points off any of its fervent adherents. This is one environmental argument I’d love for Turkheimer to embrace.
Whether the difference in IQ is caused by heredity or the environment it exists. As we correctly move away from unconstitutional DEI practices (I am looking at you Harvard) black numbers in the more highly paid professional job ranks will surely (and correctly) fall. We need to brace ourselves and society for this eventually.