Manifestation of Sea Quark Effects in the Strong Coupling Constant in Lattice QCD

We demonstrate that sea quark effects of a magnitude expected from renormalization group considerations are clearly visible in the strong coupling constant measured in current full QCD simulations. Building on this result an estimate of $\alpha_{\overline{MS}}^{(5)}(M_Z)$ is made employing the charmonium $1S-1P$ mass splitting calculated on full QCD configurations generated with two flavors of dynamical Kogut-Susskind quarks to fix the scale.