Thread by @rasmansa

More Japanese have held 100m world records than anyone from a West African country. No West African nation has won the 100m sprint.

Sprinting has been dominated by Jamaicans and Americans. These ideas like most others like them are completely resistant to evidence.

The genetic hypothesis is really easy to test here. If it's genetic that West Africans have a "sprint" gene(s), then one would expect more of this gene(s) in Jamaicans and Americans than in West Africans, and in West Africans than in Japanese.

We know these arguments aren't coming from research and are often resistant to actual science, so let's use common sense.

If it's some "black" sprint gene, then more mixed folks should have less of these genes. Guess who's more admixed than West Africans? Jamaicans and Americans

In Chad, their sprint record is 10.25s. That's just 0.01 seconds faster than India's fastest.

But there's a trick built into this that still makes it impossible to dismiss to the garbage heap it belongs to: it has every bit of evidence built in as exceptions.

They usually say outliers are proof of higher genetic averages. They use that to say Ashkenazi are genetically more intelligent because there are more Ashkenazi Nobel winners. But the fact that I looked for the best in each country? Doesn't count because it's not "the average".

So just like that, the absence of any sprint dominance from those West African nations doesn't count, because their co-race members in Jamaica and the US represent them as proof of West African genetic dominance 🙄

Mansa, you didn't test enough people in Chad and India to claim there's no evidence that Chadians are genetically better sprinters on average than Indians.

But of course the lack of "no evidence" is just proof that they should just be able to say it without my judgement 🙄

Yes, the inverted burden of proof was intentional, it's a common and intentional move.

These stories are immune to attempts to prove them wrong. Any science, research or argument that disagrees with those beliefs are used as proof of "blank slatists" to denying "obvious" truths

I knock on race (pseudo)science ideas regularly because biological race is an incoherent genetic concept. That said, very few people who accept the consensus on biological race, believe as claimed that all populations are the same genetically. It makes no sense.

The average Indonesian is pretty different from the average Japanese who's pretty different from the average North Korean. Different genes are distributed and expressed differently across populations, and that has nothing to do with the population itself, but the individuals.

I actually find human genetics interesting, there is real science being done to explore why Jamaicans are so damn good at sprinting. The ACTN3 gene is one interesting place, but doesn't explain why Jamaicans dominate as it's more favorable to West Africans than Jamaicans.

If you'd actually like to see people doing research into individual's genetic variation for sprinting, a paper like this one can tell you more about the ACTN3 gene.

No one's afraid of science. We just prefer science be backed by research not ideology.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Please stop pleading about how academia silences those who "know the truth" about differences between groups and how in just a few years the renegades will overturn the consensus with proof of these inherent differences (usually bigger "groups" here, wink wink)

Let's not pretend that those pushing the idea of racial traits are Galileos here. These ideas were dominant for centuries and still are among lay people. Scientists and researchers picking them apart for the last few decades doesn't suddenly make these ideas novel or brave.

This is like watching someone who was winning all the games in a sport complain that the reason they can't beat the young kids anymore is because the refs are cheating. Nah, the old racial ideas have just ran into the Lightening Bolt of modern genetics research.

/Done rant