Re: Are Negroid muscle and bone structures different than Caucasian?

You've asked me one of those dangerous questions, which makes it very 
difficult to answer. The big problem here is that it is difficult to 
separate our cultural impression (prejudices that we may not even realize 
that we have) from our scientific objectivity. In some ways our cultural 
impressions can make us see differences that aren't really there, or can 
make us magnify the importance of the differences that we see. 

This problem has led some scientists to assert that there are no biological 
distinctions that can be used to create groups of people. Racial categories 
are examples of a "folk" taxonomy, which are groups based purely on 
cultural concepts and which therefore have no biological meaning. There is 
some scientific evidence to support this claim. Scientists are hard pressed 
to come up with meaningful boundaries between recognized racial groups, 
which means of course that they are having trouble defining "race." When 
boundaries are defined (even temporarily) scientists usually find that 
there is more variation within a group then there are between the groups. 
This finding again supports the notion that there is no such thing as human 
races.

Other scientists claim that the "no race" perspective is naive and is 
itself a product of cultural impressions. Most of us live in democratic 
societies, where we like to claim that all people are equal (whether it 
works out that way or not is another problem). That, of course, is a 
cultural ideal that should have no bearing on scientific truth. These 
scientists point out that there are plenty of phenomena in nature where it 
is hard to define boundaries (where does the atmosphere stop and space 
begin?) but that does not, and should not, prevent us from studying the 
characteristics within these fuzzy boundaries. These scientists make use of 
the race concept in many ways, including the identification of human 
remains after mass disasters.

This topic continues to be the center of hot debate -- so much so that a 
lot of name calling is going on with very little science to back it up. 
Thus, whenever you delve into this question, you run the risk of being 
called "racist" or "simplistic." Either label is very insulting to a 
scientist.

The essential problem here is to formulate a question that compares human 
groups in a meaningful way, yet in a way that is not subject to the 
interpretation of our known or unknown biases. The question you asked using 
the Olympic Athletes as an example, can be used to illustrate this problem.

You noted that people of African descent seem to be represented on the US 
Olympic team out of proportion to their representation in the US 
population. I don't know if this observation is true, but I'll accept it as 
fact for the sake of discussion. You use that information to conclude the 
African Americans possess some type of inherent superior athletic ability, 
and you ask if that conclusion is correct. This conclusion provides an 
example of two very common problems that arise when studying human racial 
groups.

First problem: the US Olympic team was not assembled through an acceptable 
sampling method. This is an example of an opportunity bias. No matter how 
you want to look at it, athletes of Olympic caliper are unusual people. 
Although they represent a convenient source of data, we don't want to 
characterize a population based upon its unusual members. Instead, we want 
to look at the norm and the associated range of variability.  

Second Problem: if there was an "inherent" superiority associated with this 
racial group, then shouldn't we expect the African nations to dominate the 
Olympic medals? Why doesn't that happen? Again, we are looking a too small 
a piece of the puzzle if we limit ourselves merely to the US Olympic team. 
This second problem strongly hints that there is a strong cultural 
influence that determines how well you do as an Olympic athlete, or even 
whether you make the team. Unless, or until, we can separate the cultural 
influence from biological influence, we really cannot make a sound 
scientific assessment.

These two problems have, unfortunately, been very common in human science. 
One of the hardest things to do is maintain objectivity when you are 
involved in the problem. Some people, therefore, state that we should not 
even ask the question. It is impossible to answer correctly and too many 
people have suffered because of the bad answers that have been produced in 
the past. I would argue the opposite. While there are bad answers, there 
are no bad questions in science. Just because a question is hard to answer, 
or because its answer might be unpleasant, is no reason not to ask. Galileo 
taught us that.