Searching "comments":
| # | Comment | Survey |
|---|---|---|
| 41 | Ha! | At which colleges/universities have you attended classes? |
| 42 | The 40 degree one. I can't tell you by how much though: I'm still waiting for that damn rock to hit the bottom of the 30 degree bucket.  Now which one hits the bottom first if I add a pound of salt to the water before chilling the buckets? | If the pH of pure water is 7 at room temperature, what do you think happens to the pH of pure water when you heat it? |
| 43 | I work for a French company: I don't think I could answer objectively.  | How do you feel about France? |
| 44 | I don't. | What do you think of Jennifer Lopez? |
| 45 | It's probably still several billion years away. | Do you think the end of the world is imminent? |
| 46 | I'd rather have two (or more) differing parties that I hate than just one that I like. | What party would you rather controlled the United States of America? |
| 47 | Blacks in the NBA are hard evidence? Puh-lease. Blacks are over-represented in boxing too, yet less than a century ago blacks were rare and Jews were over-represented. Have significant evolutionary changes happened in four short generations? | Which of the following common perceptions do you believe exist? |
| 48 | I'm not at all suggesting that there are not "significant differences between human genetic patterns". I'm saying that, firstly, "black" (especially in America) is much too genetically diverse to be particularly meaningful; secondly, even were that not the case, an over-representation of a race in a sport in not "hard evidence" about anything: at best it's suggestive (correlation does not equal causation and all that); thirdly, even if genetics were a significant factor (it need not even be primary), you would need to explain the rapidity (in evolutionary terms) of the drastic change of racial representation in professional sports. Given both the speed of the changes (which mirrored changes in social class: a far more parsimonious explanation) and the gross imprecision of a classification like "black" the most that I'm willing to say is that genetic effects, if any, are lost in the (considerable) noise. | Which of the following common perceptions do you believe exist? |
| 49 | For point one, you are correct that statistical trends can be valid for a genetically diverse group. If you then claim that your observed trend is (at least partially) explained by genetic factors, the group must share those factors. We seem to agree on point two. For point three, since you decided to claim that blacks move from amateur to pro at at higher rate than anyone else, I'll let you prove it. I don't know one way or the other: I see black players over-represented both in pro and amateur basketball. Point four is the critical one: I don't think that you can calculate the social factors precisely enough to be able to eliminate them from consideration. If you think otherwise, please share your calculations. I think we more or less agree on point five, if race correlates to height and height correlates to basketball playing ability then you would have a weaker correlation between race and ability. Note that this still doesn't necessarily point directly to genetics (although that is a simple explanation): again social issues, tied to race, may alter upbringing in ways that affect height (as well as more general athletic ability). There's also a practical problem with your reasoning there: in the US, white men tend to be taller than black men. | Which of the following common perceptions do you believe exist? |
| 50 | 1) Here's some data for white men and black men. 3) Why are you using college numbers? Some people go straight from high school to the NBA (which I suspect is more prevalent among blacks) and some go to college precisely because of basketball talent (likewise). You need to compare the entire pool of potential NBA players, not a selected subset. 4-6) "There is a reason" Why yes, there is a reason (two actually), although they're not what you apparently think. The first reason why I think social factors predominate over genetic ones is the same as I said in my very first comment (and that you neatly avoided answering). Racial makeup of pro sports teams changes very quickly: complete changes happen in a few generations. If you assume that genetic factors predominate, you need to come up with some confounding influence that explains why the makeup changes orders of magnitude faster than the genes that are supposedly causing the makeup. I'd rather look to factors that change over the same time frame. The second reason is that the groups that are exhibiting the behavior are more accurately defined as social groups than genetic groups. "black" doesn't tell you very much about the genetic factors but it tells you a great deal (again, in the US) about social factors. | Which of the following common perceptions do you believe exist? |
