Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Race, Intelligence and the value of scientific inquiry

highthief · 01-25-2008, 04:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ratbastid

So I think you're right about people of european descent being more generalist--they interbred more among various population centers over the last thousand years. Africa, by contrast, is much harder to get around. The geography alone would seem to promote the development of discrete genetic pools that would evolve domain-specific traits and talents.

I wanted to highlight this after all this time as I was just reading about the success of the Kenyan middle distance runners and how they have come to dominate middle distance running. I will paraphrase what the author, Nicholas Wade, write in "Before the Dawn":

Kenyans hold all the fastest 3,000 metre steeplechase times and about 50% of the best 5k and 10K times in the world. Within Kenya, most of these fastest times are held by Kelanjin speaking people of the Great Rift Valley, particularly a small group of this population called the Nandi. They comprise less than 2% of the general Kenyan population but are the largest single group of elite runners in the country and have won more than 20% of the elite middle distance running events in the world the last few years.

Interestingly, Kenyan attempts to extend their track dominance to the sprints has failed completely - the best Kenyan 100 metre time ranks about 5,000th on the all time list.

John Manners, an author of various works on running, ascribes a genetic component to the Nandi success at middle distances. Not only do they live at a 2,000 metre altitude, one of their customs may have led to a genetic preference for excellent distance running.

The Nandi have a custom of cattle raiding - this raiding is done over long distances. The better a man was at running for distance, the better his success at raiding. The more success he has at raiding, the more wives he can afford - consequently, men who are good raiders (and thus, good runners) have many more children than men who are not good runners/raiders.