I Owe It All to You
Posted on August 19th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
I love it when friends/blog-readers send me items that they think I’d like to post, or just should be posted. Seriously. They’re usually pretty interesting, sometimes pretty funny.
Here’s one article sent to me by a friend who reads Slate. It’s about why Jamaicans are so fast. Some of their speed due to genetics!
70 percent of Jamaicans have the “strong” form of the ACTN3 gene—which produces a protein in their fast-twitch muscle fibers that has been linked to increased sprinting performance. That’s a significantly higher percentage than in the United States, where about 60 percent have the gene variant.
Isn’t it fascinating the way that science is gradually, inexorably trumping politics in this discussion of why various people do various things better than other people do?
Another friend sent me this story about a man who is suing a Chicago restaurant, saying that its undercooked salmon gave him a 9-foot tapeworm. (My friend kindly wished the same on me.)
He later passed the giant parasite…
The man wants $100k, which seems not nearly enough….
According to the Web site mayoclinic.com, tapeworms can measure up to 50 feet long….
10 Responses
8/19/2008 4:34 pm
The Slate Explainer (see article on Jamaican sprinters) should explain whether, when a 50 foot tape worm is inside you, you can feel it wriggling and jiggling around…. Just wondering.
8/19/2008 4:50 pm
yuck
8/19/2008 4:52 pm
Many cases of tapeworm infection are asymptomatic (they show no symptoms). In such cases, the person may not know they are infected until they notice pieces of tapeworm in their faeces. Where symptoms do occur, they may include nausea, mild or abdominal pain or diarrhoea.
If a person is infected with the fish tapeworm, symptoms may include diarrhoea, weakness or fatigue.
8/19/2008 5:35 pm
Does that mean we somehow need to get the Jamaican sprinters infected with these worms so our sprinters will have a chance to win the 200M?
8/20/2008 9:11 am
This isn’t science trumping politics. Without having read the original paper, I can’t say whether this is science overreaching in its conclusions based on limited data or whether it’s the press misinterpreting scientific results, but it’s certainly one or the other.
The sentence that you quote shows that environment is much more important than genetics. 70% of the Jamaican population is about 1.9 million people. 60% of the U.S. population is about 180 million people. Even though the percentage of Jamaicans with the “strong” form of the ACTN3 gene is much larger, there should still be 100 times as many Americans with it than Jamaicans.
Another problem is the assumption that nothing will change as time goes on. According to the article, “in 2004, [Jamaicans] held all but five of the 500 best times in the 100-meter dash.” So what? What was the case in 1994, or 1984, or 1954? Why do we assume that because Jamaicans have dominated sprinting lately, they’ll continue to dominate? If their genetic makeup is the difference-maker, they should dominate forever, and they should have always dominated. There are many examples of particular ethnic groups dominating a sport-African Americans in basketball, French Canadians in hockey, Irish Americans in baseball (in the early 1900s)-whose dominance either lessened or completely disappeared as circumstances changed.
8/20/2008 1:05 pm
And Jews in basketball!! Read the second paragraph of this account of the Southern Philadelphia Hebrew Association basketball team.
8/20/2008 1:42 pm
Didn’t Jimmy the Greek explain a few years ago with his comments about the “high buttocks” (if I remember correctly) of African-American athletes?
8/20/2008 1:43 pm
Explain “all this”, I should have said.
8/20/2008 2:46 pm
“The black is a better athlete to begin with because he’s been bred to be that way — because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs. This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trading, the owner — the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid.” - Jimmy Snyder (September 9, 2024 – April 21, 2024), better known as “Jimmy the Greek”, was an American sports commentator and Las Vegas bookie.
8/20/2008 8:39 pm
Here’s another entry in the nature/nurture debate for you:
According to a new report, high school girls are now taking as many math classes as high school boys and girls are now slightly more likely than boys to take advanced math courses.