Aron.Foster

Editing R&I

Aron, I'm asking people to avoid even minor edits to R&I until we can move forward with consensus. While I don't object to the change made, I am trying to hold back the tide and prevent the outbreak of an edit war. I'm asking contributors to discuss cahnges first. Even small edits risk setting a bad precedent. Would you ind reverting your last edit, and add it to the list of requested edits at the talk page? Thanks! --Kevin Murray (talk) 22:02, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! --Kevin Murray (talk) 22:11, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

My bad memory

Hi, wanted to say that a little while ago I directed you to Joseph L. Graves book "The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millenium" for a discussion about why African Americans are over represented in sports in the USA, and why this is not due to biological differences between "races". I must admit to having done this from memory and my memory is clearly very poor. Graves actually discusses this in his more recent book "The Race Myth: Why we Pretend Race Exists in America". He has a chapter (chapter 6) entitled "Europeans, not West Africans, Dominate the NBA: The Social construction of Race and Sports". Here he states that the distribution of different muscle fibres in different populations is not significantly different, but also that the single study that claimed to have found the difference had assumed that the difference they found was the result of genetic differences. But as any molecular biologist knows protein expression and physiology is adaptive. For example the reason people who live at altitude have high levels of red blood cells is not due to "genetics" but due to their metabolism adjusting to low levels of oxygen. This is why long distance runners aclimatise themselves to high altitudes before competitions. But it's not genetic. Furthermore the difference between people in the study was 67.5% fast muscle type for black people and 59% fast muscle type for white people, he concludes that even if this were true (which he disputes) it is no where near enough to explain the over representation of black people in sports. Anyway I can't easily summarise the chapter here, but it's worth reading. All the best. Alun (talk) 18:32, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

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