Acting White: Endurance vs. Speed

As I watched the closing ceremony of the Olympics, and the east and north African sweep of the marathon, I had pause to wonder why they are so dominant, compared to West African progeny in the sprints. That same day I got an email from a friend pointing to an article of the same topic.

The gist of my agreement with the writer’s points (not all) is that natural selection, driven by environment, is responsible, in this Olympics case, for athletes with optimal physiology for these events. Because running in Olympic events is nearly identical to what humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years, unlike volleyball, we can more readily see the evolution and selection.

Furthermore, when we see the dark-skinned Africans, including West African slave descendants, we are looking at Africans who spent the longest time, of any one group, in their respective single geographies, yielding the most consistent influence to specific traits for speed or endurance in running. White, yellow, and brown ‘Africans’, the progeny of earlier black Africans who departed the continent, display a wider range of physical traits as a result of the demands of diverse geography around the planet.

No doubt that thousands of years ago Jamaican superman Usain Bolt would have had many wives and children, as well as riches, for his prowess, as would gold medal record-holding Michael Phelps, in locales where swimming fed the kiddies. In one sense these athletes are anomalies, but at the same time they point us towards wondrous notions of genetic adaptation and natural selection, upon which our survival and advancement as a species is totally dependent.

James C. Collier

HT: Mangan's Miscellany

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