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Maybe true, but I think you forgot that the number of prospective non-black professional athletes outnumbers the number of prospective black athletes by 9:1.
And yet, we are seeing 8:1 in the other direction. Sure the number of pro athletes and olympians is small, but blacks would need to have a higher variance not only than whites but higher than every other racial group as well. This seems less plausible than that they are, on average, more athletic than the other races. In any event, this would be pretty easy to test, so if this were the actual reason, I would think someone would have proven it by now.
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Please propose a study that would be able to adequately test the extremes of these populations.
Don't you think if it were an easy study to undertake that people who believe that it isn't a variance thing would do the study to prove that whites and blacks have the same variance?
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The study wouldn't test the extremes or the variance; it would simply test the proposition that we actually care about (i.e. averages across racial groups). Obtaining direct evidence of averages across a large sample for things like foot speed and jump height is not difficult. He is proposing an alternative explanation that seems implausible, as proof of a negative. Proving the positive, i.e. that blacks are, on average, faster, stronger, etc. is quite easy to prove (or disprove) directly.
edited to add -- whatever data set is used to determine cutoffs for the presidential physical fitness test (
http://www.presidentschallenge.org/e...standards.aspx) would probably suffice.
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But the distribution is way more important than the average in this case. If it were the case that blacks and whites have the exact same distribution except that black people have a much longer tail at the positive end, this would not necessarily mean that black people are more athletic than white people. It simply means that there are more of them at the extreme end. This would affect the "average" athleticism score, but it wouldn't prove what some people are claiming.