Genome and Genetics Disccussions (Stay within SD Rules)

taxiya · Aug 23, 2016

vesicles said:
Yeah, that myth has been debunked long ago. The extract oxygen-carrying capacity can only last a couple days once you come down to the sea level. So by the time you get to the competition site, your red blood cells go back to normal capacity. So it's actually useless. Even if it is true, it should be categorized as environmental factor and training technique, not genetics.

You mean the "training at high altitude" as a myth, not what Chinese teams really do?
Or the effectiveness of it is a myth, but Chinese teams really do so anyway?

Since Tibetans have such genetic advantage, how come we don't see many Tibetans on Chinese teams at any level of competition? What about Nepal? How many gold have they won? they live in the same high altitude environment as the Tibetans.

"how come", because the remoteness, lack of basic facility to train and select? The same as China did not participate Olympic until 1984? Or the same as in Olympic 1932, Liu Changchun being the only athlete from China of a population of 400 million?

Yes as you said factors other than genetics play important role too, but their importance is not enough to dismiss the genetic advantage either because genetic advantage does not necessarily translate to success. The two factors are not at odd to each other.

Tibetans do have an "over" representation in Chinese mountaineering team. It is clearly shown in the composition of the 2008 Olympic torch accession team to Mount Qomolangma (Everest). One image really impressed me was that a Tibetan member of the team (小扎西次仁?) carried a camera or a rely antenna like taking a troll over 8000 meters in the death zone. He didn't show any struggle. All my family was "shocked" in front the TV. Another team member, a Han Wang Yungfeng王勇峰, carried the torch close to the summit with great exhaustion (maybe due to his age, in the mid-30s) before handing over to 次仁旺姆(Tibetan).

The composition of the Chinese mountaineering team in that accession, in total 13 Tibetans of 19 peoples.

突击组(12人): The main accession team (12)
组长:尼玛次仁 Team leader (Tibetan)
副组长:罗申 Deputy leader (Han)
队员 (team member):达琼(Tibetan)、吉吉(Tibetan)、次仁旺姆(Tibetan)、李福庆(Han)、黄春贵(Han)、袁复栋(Han)、罗布占堆(Tibetan)、阿旺扎西(Tibetan)、小扎西次仁(Tibetan)、普布顿珠(Tibetan)。

支援组(7人): Support/backup team (7)
组长:次落 (Tibetan)
队员:王勇峰(Han)、德庆欧珠(Tibetan)、次旦久美(Tibetan)、边巴顿珠(Tibetan)、严冬冬(Han)、洛则 (Tibetan)

The point is, given a good chance, Tibetans can perform batter than others in that domain of sports. But genetic advantage does give them a better chance to succeed.

manqiangrexue · Aug 23, 2016

solarz said:
Nope, not at all, but for every explanation you can come up with for genetic factors, I can come up with an explanation based on socio-economic and cultural factors.

The point is, it is impossible to separate the two.

Take the example of running vs swimming. Blacks represent only 12% of the US population. However, if 50% (hypothetically) of them pursue a sports-related career compared to 5% from the non-black population, then they already have a number advantage. Then, if 50% of that 50% go into running (again, hypothetically), compared to 25% of the 5% of non-blacks, then they will represent a large majority.

Let's imagine that that's true. Are the numbers so skewed that not one non-black person could be a champion in the last 20 years? Are they so skewed that just by luck, every American sprinter sent to the Olympics is black, EVERY last one?

African nations are among the most disadvantaged nations in the world, and running is one of the cheapest sports you can train at. You don't need an expensive swimming pool, you don't need expensive equipment, hell, you don't even need a dedicated venue. If these nations concentrated their talent at running, then obviously they will achieve better results than other nations who might have spread their talents and resources into many other kinds of sports.

There is no denying that different ethnic groups have different physiology. However, you said yourself that athletes adapt themselves to their chosen sport by using different strategies. Training and nutrition are integral parts of that strategy. Everyone thought East Asians performed poorly at athletic sports due to physiological reasons until Liu Xiang won gold.

LOL Everyone still thinks East Asians perform poorly at athletic events and that's because they do! Liu Xiang makes no difference! He's an out-lier! You can't change a stereotype by 1 person's behavior; you need a majority outcome to change a stereotype because until you get the majority, the stereotype is still true!

With the proper nutrition, training strategy, and determination, you can overcome any physiological disadvantage. Now I know what you're going to say: what if all those elements were equal? Wouldn't physiology be a determinant factor then?

Falsest thing I've ever heard, the first sentence. It belongs firmly in Disney. Crazy how wrong it is. You can train any way you want to, but you will never run like Bolt or swim like Phelps because you don't have the genetic talent and they do.

The thing is, those elements are *never* equal. Usain Bolt is incredibly fast due to a combination of great genes and excellent conditioning. Even if you could clone him, you cannot replicate his training, experience, and mental focus. Currently, Bolt is the fastest runner in history. However, how do you know that in 20 years, the fastest runner won't be asian? Population selection, combined with improved conditioning techniques, could very well make that a reality.

How do I know in 20 years? I don't know. I would give one testicle to see China dominate sprinting LOL If they find that guy who's 6 SD's above the norm and he does the 100 in 9.55 seconds, I will cry, I swear. (I'm welling up just thinking about it LOL) But to dominate, you need more than 1. You need to find a remote village in China somewhere that has incredible genetics that we never knew about before.

manqiangrexue · Aug 23, 2016

solarz said:
But that's exactly what environmental factors are! The ability to bring out the best, whether in individuals or in populations, through methods other than natural selection.

This whole discussion is centered on olympic athletes, which represent 0.0001% of a nation's population. Maybe Jamaica has 1000 kids with the potential to be as fast as Bolt, and China has only 100, but what if China was able to find and train 90 of those 100 kids, while Jamaica could only find and train 30 of those 1000 kids?

I think what you meant to say is, what if Jamaica only manages to find someone who is 2 SD's above their norm, but China got someone 5 SD's above the norm? Yes, that's what I was saying about the population averages. In this case, China, a population with poorer sprinting genetics than Jamaica on average, may win. Problem is, how do you find such a person in his early childhood hidden in such a vast population?

solarz · Aug 23, 2016

manqiangrexue said:
I think what you meant to say is, what if Jamaica only manages to find someone who is 2 SD's above their norm, but China got someone 5 SD's above the norm? Yes, that's what I was saying about the population averages. In this case, China, a population with poorer sprinting genetics than Jamaica on average, may win. Problem is, how do you find such a person in his early childhood hidden in such a vast population?

By setting up programs that encourage kids with such aptitudes to pursue their talent, hiring talent recruiters who scour the country for new talent, and by setting up financial incentives to support these athletes in their training.

manqiangrexue said:
Falsest thing I've ever heard, the first sentence. It belongs firmly in Disney. Crazy how wrong it is. You can train any way you want to, but you will never run like Bolt or swim like Phelps because you don't have the genetic talent and they do.

Maybe not on the individual level, but what about on the population level? At the population numbers we're talking about, it's a statistical certainty that these top-tier talents exist, it's just a question of identifying and nurturing them properly. Hence, environmental factors.

manqiangrexue · Aug 23, 2016

solarz said:
By setting up programs that encourage kids with such aptitudes to pursue their talent, hiring talent recruiters who scour the country for new talent, and by setting up financial incentives to support these athletes in their training.

Maybe not on the individual level, but what about on the population level? At the population numbers we're talking about, it's a statistical certainty that these top-tier talents exist, it's just a question of identifying and nurturing them properly. Hence, environmental factors.

We are on perfect agreement on this one. But it's much more easily said than done. How far-reaching and ingenius would your program have to be to find maybe 3 or 5 people in 1.4 billion, AND that person is a child who has no idea of his potential and neither does his parents? (You yourself, as a recruiter, could be standing in front of a Chinese baby Usain Bolt but not know you were right in selecting him until he comes of age and starts doing sub-10 runs daily.) Most Chinese parents would not encourage their child to pursue a sports career simply they don't believe that s/he could be one of the rare talents in the country. If he's not, but he goes all-in on sports anyway, he could go hungry and broke. An athlete in China who can't make it to international competition is as good as a street sweeper. They'd rather him study and get a safer job with an "Iron rice bowl."

vesicles · Aug 23, 2016

manqiangrexue said:
The final outcome is that only black people win the dash events and nothing that China or any other country (USA included) does can put a white/Asian/Latino man there, not anywhere on the podium, and most of the times, not even in the finals. Your "What if the black dude was sick with sickle cell?" example shows how desperate you are to get a grasp.

You challenge me to find an experiment done on humans raised in the same conditions as lab rats and raced to find out their distinct advantages? LOL You know better than to ask for that. Don't process information like a machine; use your brain to extrapolate from the best data you can get and that's what I just wrote to you in the last paragraph.

I can't believe this. I don't think you are who you said you are. As a trained biologist, you should know where to look to find such material.

I did it for you. I went to PubMed and did a quick search and found 62 such studies within a couple seconds.

Here is a review study on potential racial difference in diabetes and heart diseases.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

As I have always insisted, athletic activities are highly coordinated events that incorporate many parts of your body. An advantage on one part does not necessarily allow you to out-perform others.

As this article indicates, although blacks have different types of muscle fibers than whites, these muscle fibers also lower blacks' aerobic capacity. This means that blacks have less endurance than whites, making them at a disadvantage at long distance running. This has been attributed to higher incidence of diabetes and heart diseases.

As I have mentioned before in the example of sickle-cell disease and the example of improving the performance of a car, simply improving one aspect of your physiology does not give you the ultimate advantage in a sporting event. Blacks may have different muscle fibers, which lowers their oxygen carrying capacity and compromising their endurance.

So why African countries dominate long distance running? As I have said long ago, people in the developed countries lost interest in such sport. With limited participants, they lack capable competitors.

solarz · Aug 23, 2016

manqiangrexue said:
We are on perfect agreement on this one. But it's much more easily said than done. How far-reaching and ingenius would your program have to be to find maybe 3 or 5 people in 1.4 billion, AND that person is a child who has no idea of his potential and neither does his parents? Most Chinese parents would not encourage their child to pursue a sports career simply they don't believe that s/he could be one of the rare talents in the country. If he's not, but he goes all-in on sports anyway, he could go hungry and broke. An athlete in China who can't make it to international competition is as good as a street sweeper. They'd rather him study and get a safer job with an "Iron rice bowl."

That's just it, how do you know it's 3-5 people in 1.4 billion? How do you know it's not 3000-5000 people in 1.4 billion? We have no data to support either supposition, and we're never likely going to have that kind of data.

taxiya · Aug 23, 2016

solarz said:
By setting up programs that encourage kids with such aptitudes to pursue their talent, hiring talent recruiters who scour the country for new talent, and by setting up financial incentives to support these athletes in their training.

Maybe not on the individual level, but what about on the population level? At the population numbers we're talking about, it's a statistical certainty that these top-tier talents exist, it's just a question of identifying and nurturing them properly. Hence, environmental factors.

What you are saying is to use system like training and discovering the talented to compensate the disadvantage of genetics. That is your solution to the shortfall, but not rejecting the existence of the shortfall.

It surely works, no doubt, but it does not run against the genetic advantage either because the reason that you do it is because of the difficulties in finding the right one in a vast pool of population.

I don't really see a disagreement between you and manqiangrexue's posts as he did not dismiss the importance of training. If we all agree the importance of both factors, we are perfectly agreeing to one another.

taxiya · Aug 23, 2016

vesicles said:
I can't believe this. I don't think you are who you said you are. As a trained biologist, you should know where to look to find such material.

I did it for you. I went to PubMed and did a quick search and found 62 such studies within a couple seconds.

Here is a review study on potential racial difference in diabetes and heart diseases.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

As I have always insisted, athletic activities are highly coordinated events that incorporate many parts of your body. An advantage on one part does not necessarily allow you to out-perform others.

As this article indicates, although blacks have different types of muscle fibers than whites, these muscle fibers also lower blacks' aerobic capacity. This means that blacks have less endurance than whites, making them at a disadvantage at long distance running. This has been attributed to higher incidence of diabetes and heart diseases.

As I have mentioned before in the example of sickle-cell disease and the example of improving the performance of a car, simply improving one aspect of your physiology does not give you the ultimate advantage in a sporting event. Blacks may have different muscle fibers, which lowers their oxygen carrying capacity and compromising their endurance.

So why African countries dominate long distance running? As I have said long ago, people in the developed countries lost interest in such sport. With limited participants, they lack capable competitors.

Sorry if I look like chasing you around.

But isn't Japan a good example of competing hard in long distance running? But still can't beat people from Africa?

I live in an European country where people like jogging. There are yearly marathon competitions. But every time when there are runners from Africa (it is an open international event), the leading group are predominantly east Africans. I hardly have ever seen a Caucatian in the leading group. That was actually joked about in the news. And I also made joke to my local friends "you just have no chance for the medal".

And note this, those Africans are east Africans, Ethiopia in particular, from a high plateau of open landscape, not sub-Saharans. High altitude adaptation is the genetic advantage, together with the life style on an open landscape as a training. Which part of the combination contribute the most or equally? We don't know, but I believe both, just like human evolution in general. The nature makes the mark in our genes to survive the environment together with our effort after birth to survive. Non of them can be dismissed.

manqiangrexue · Aug 23, 2016

vesicles said:
I can't believe this. I don't think you are who you said you are. As a trained biologist, you should know where to look to find such material.

You don't think I'm who I say I am? Are you kidding me? I can't believe I'm talking to a "scientist" who thinks that genetics is a voodoo pseudoscience and that black people don't have an advantage in running! Take that to the genetics department wherever you work (MD Anderson? Baylor?) and you'll get laughed out of the room by all the directors and PIs.

I did it for you. I went to PubMed and did a quick search and found 62 such studies within a couple seconds.

Studies that raised people like lab rats and compared them? You saw some studies that directly contradicted what you are observing in front of you at real live competitions and you believed them? Let's see what you found.

Here is a review study on potential racial difference in diabetes and heart diseases.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Mhm, very very interesting. So first of all, your hypothesis is that there is no genetic difference between different races, right? And then, to prove me wrong, you found me a paper that says that black people's muscles have lower aerobic capacity than white people's. Did you just pick up a rock and throw it on your own foot? LOL When you play basketball, are you the guy that makes your whole team face-palm as you accidentally throw it in your own net?

As I have always insisted, athletic activities are highly coordinated events that incorporate many parts of your body. An advantage on one part does not necessarily allow you to out-perform others.

As this article indicates, although blacks have different types of muscle fibers than whites, these muscle fibers also lower blacks' aerobic capacity. This means that blacks have less endurance than whites, making them at a disadvantage at long distance running. This has been attributed to higher incidence of diabetes and heart diseases.

So was this study conducted in African Americans or was is conducted in Kenyans? African Americans excel at sprinting, a sport that does not require high muscular aerobic capacity. Kenyans excel at marathons, which do emphasize muscular endurance, as well as specialized leg morphology. African Americans and actual Africans, although only 200 years difference, can develop slightly different genetics for specializing in their environments, and this effect is only amplified by the mixed genetic breeding pool of the US.

As I have mentioned before in the example of sickle-cell disease and the example of improving the performance of a car, simply improving one aspect of your physiology does not give you the ultimate advantage in a sporting event. Blacks may have different muscle fibers, which lowers their oxygen carrying capacity and compromising their endurance.

OK, Mr. Every-Race-is-the-Same LOL

So why African countries dominate long distance running? As I have said long ago, people in the developed countries lost interest in such sport. With limited participants, they lack capable competitors.

Mhm, how many people do you see at marathon events in the US? The streets are full, huh? I've got friends training for marathons every time I open facebook. How many people do you see sprinting, timing themselves for the 100m with a laser? I can't see a single facebook post about it and never once at the park. They could all be at the specialized gyms so I don't see them, but I guess those gyms must be bigger than Central park for there to be more sprinters than marathon runners! Americans like to run, but they don't like to sprint, yet America has much much more sprinters than marathon runners at the Olympics.

Genome and Genetics Disccussions (Stay within SD Rules)

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