Go Speed Racer: Genes, Race, and Racing

William Saletan has a new column on why White Men Can't Jump, or more precisely, on the correlation of genes, fast twitch muscle fibers, and race. It turns out that a certain gene, ACTN3 comes in a couple of types, call them R and X, that are linked to the proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers, which in turn are linked to speed. All really fast sprinters, it seems, have the RR type (you get one copy from each parent). It also turns out that gene frequencies for this gene differ significantly from race to race (he uses four "races", Asian, White, African American, and Bantu - never mind the imprecision). From his article you can deduce that those categories assort as follows:

Race ******* RR *** RX *** XX
Asian _____.25__ .50___ .25
Wh Euro ___.30 __.50__ .20
Af Am_____ .60 __.27__ .13
Af Bantu ___.81__ .18___ .01

Which seems a bit non-Mendelian for the latter categories - I have no explanation for that.

Now Asians and white Europeans are all but absent from the lists of top sprinters, even though there are lots of them in the RR category - more in absolute numbers than in the latter two categories. Also, West Africans are not dominant sprinters - mixed race sprinters from the US, the Carribean, and Europe are. Clearly, there is more to running fast than just one gene.

The fact that elite sprinters seem to come exclusively from the RR ranks does show, however, than genes matter, just in case anyone doubted it. We will doubtless see more and more genes identified that are correlated to real traits. This is at best a very mixed blessing.


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