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I agree, it shakes a lot of deeply held Uncle Roy assumptions I was raised with! There's a tendency to always see whatever obstacles have already been done away with as resulting in a "final product" of a society, and it keeps turning out we're wrong. The same assumption is made about class in every society: the current upper class tells myths of a prior class system that was unfair and stupid that put them at the bottom, but the current system that puts them at the top is justified and logical. It's hard to critically examine assumptions about the world.
My guess is that we're also seeing assimilation, with black teens acting more like white teens. I've seen it argued that much of the purported drop in teen sexual intercourse in America disappears if looking purely at whites; the white rate has remained the same while the black rate has converged with the white rate. Life paths are probably converging in other ways as well.
Notably we're writing about five minutes after Jon Jones retired, but it's actually notable that the UFC is pretty dominated by a really tiny global minority of central Asian athletes. I'm sure there are people who assume it is genetic, as they previously did with every other ethnic minority that has dominated a sport.
Jon Jones has been effectively retired for years now. I'd argue the central Asian thing is more that it's the only region where truly top class athletes will go into combat sports as a first option and then don't make enough money doing those so the UFC seems palatable.
I mean, that's exactly my point. It's all downstream of cultural or economic questions, of interest and the availability of a strong culture of training, you need the right economic mix of availability of training with desperation to succeed. This is obviously visible in sports, but there's no reason to think that it's less true of other human endeavors.
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