Breeding a better athlete
Taller, heavier: the speedy evolution of the fastest people on the planet:
While the average person has gained about five centimetres since 1900, the height of champion runners has increased 16.2 centimetres, say Duke University researchers, Jordan Charles and Adrian Bejan, who studied the heights and weights of 100-metre world record holders.”The trends revealed by our analysis suggest that speed records will continue to be dominated by heavier and taller athletes,” said Mr Charles, whose study was published last month in The Journal of Experimental Biology .
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While Dr Norton dismissed those predictions, he believed that the laws of genetics, thanks to the habit of athletes marrying athletes – and possibly even the creation of athlete sperm banks – meant runners would continue growing taller, more powerful and faster.
Remember the “Little Hercules” with the myostatin mutation? His mother was very muscular, and reportedly there was a family history of mesomorphicity. One way population level quantitative trait mean value can shift through selection beyond the most extreme values of the original population without new mutation being necessary is simply to change the underlying allele frequencies enough so that originally unlikely combinations become common. Assortative mating is another variant of this dynamic, if people several sigmas from the mean mate, then new combinations are likely to emerge.
Instead of looking for genetic explanations, I think it is probably more likely that PEDs have been responsible for top speed athletes becoming taller relative to the general population than in years past. Unenhanced, taller people may not usually have the strength to take advantage of the leverage inherent in their longer limbs due to greater torque. Enhanced, they have the power to take full advantage of their frames.
I suspect this would apply to many other sports as well. For instance, given that US men born in the 80s are only about 1 cm taller than men born in 1950, I suspect that if there was truly effective drug testing you’d see baseball players to go back to mostly being between 5’8″ and 6’2″ and under 200lbs. and most the 6’5″, 250+ lb. behomoths would disappear. I also suspect you’d see football lineman shrink back to being in the 6’2″ to 6’4″, 250-260lb. range instead of these 6’5″-6’8″, 320lb. monstrosities we see today.
As a personal anecdote, going into my senior year of highschool I attended a football camp at a D-I school run by the programs’ coaches. They were salivating over some rather giant oafy kids. One kid, who was about 6’5″ and 265 lbs. was weak, slow and a terrible athlete, but the line coach was hanging all over him. After a drill, he commented to the coach, “Unfortunatly I don’t have quick feet.” The coach replied, “Don’t worry about that son. All we want is your frame. We can give you stuff to make you athletic.”
The fall of the Berlin Wall ended the golden age of E. German sports medicine, though I imagine that the individuals involved were able to carry on. But with selective breeding for specific events you could develop some real freaks. I’m not an engineer, but an ideal high jumper would have fast, powerful legs and almost no upper body strength. Whether he should be tall, I don’t know, but definitely minimal body above the waist. Long arms probably help for balancing and negotiating the crossover, which has to be done exactly right.
I agree with RT that drugs and better training are responsible for the fact that athletes are better now than 50 years ago, but the idea of athletes marring each other and producing super athletes is an intriguing one. Recently some new rules forbidding certain actions were added in pro-football because the men are so huge now that they are injuring each other more. If genetic engineering techniques get good enough, we will have the ability to create better athletes.
I think that associative mating is more likely to happen with intelligence because the importance of intelligence in determining the course of someone’s life is usually greater than the importance of athletic ability (the exceptions are professional athletes, dancers, ect.) Does this mean in a few generations the standard deviation of IQ distributions could increase? It is certainly possible.
“I think that associative mating is more likely to happen with intelligence”
It’s certainly already happening. Silicon Valley has one of the highest rates of Asperger’s children in the country. They suspected it was something in the environment. Turns out, it’s engineers marrying engineers.
I’d just like to point out that in 1900 probably 0% of champion runners were of african descent, and now probably close to 100% are. I mean, maybe the sport just opened up to new competition?
Still, the comment about producing super-athletes is interesting, and the analogy to IQ is also very interesting.
I think it’s a glimmer of hope for those who believe there is massive dysgenia going on because of the inverse-relationship between IQ and fecundity. Even though the smart people are not spreading their genes as fast (or possibly not even replacing them as they die out) they do seem to be concentrating, as people don’t mate randomly, and probably assort far more efficiently than they did at anytime in the past.
Thus, given a possibly dysgenic trend, we may well continue to produce ever smarter people through the concentration of certain genes in a portion of the population, even if the rest just gets dumber (which I actually don’t believe). Morloks and Eloi anyone?
For athletes, I think as people mentioned, with nutrition, medicine, steroids and the inclusion of more people (from different genetic backgrounds), genetics is probably not the best explanation, though obviously possible.
It’s certainly already happening. Silicon Valley has one of the highest rates of Asperger’s children in the country. They suspected it was something in the environment. Turns out, it’s engineers marrying engineers.
Associative mating is certainly happening but it would be interesting to see evidence that it is behind the high rates in Sillicon Valley. There are many places with high concentrations of engineers – do we see the same correlation as is supposedly shown in SV? The evidence for environmental effects is already there. E.g. some national studies have shown significant correlation between autism rates and environmental factors such as the level of precipitation.
http://news.healingwell.com/index.php?p=news1&id=620935
Today’s elite athletes are also much more elite and specialized than those in 1900, so they resemble the average person far less in many traits other than height. If you look at old photos from the Olympics the weightlifters and swimmers will look pretty much alike. In Beijing you can see enormous differences between the two groups even in things like skull shape which shouldn’t matter for either sport.
With top female athletes becoming more athletic (via PEDs or otherwise) I’m sure we are seeing a lot more assortative mating, too. I mean, big strong girls want guys who will make them feel delicate and feminine. If you’re a female hammer thrower then not only do you spend most of your time around track and field athletes and coaches, you also probably won’t want any average-sized average-shaped guy. Although I remember seeing a photo of Betty Heidler with a skinny boyfriend, I remember it precisely because it was such a glaring exception.
You don’t need the bottom to get dumber for pseudo dysgenic effects. Even with the Flynn Effect, if the bottom grows smarter at a much slower rate than the top while the latter continue having fewer kids, the world will come to feel like a dysgenic dystopia even if the bottom are quite clever by historical standards. This will be especially true of countries like the U.S. which are welcoming of low skilled immigrants but also magnets for the highest IQ professionals. Without strong selection pressures on the bottom (and with technology making it easier to survive with a low IQ) market pressure on the high end could lead to some weirdly asymmetric IQ differences by population class.
Slightly OT, but does anyone think as I do, that the recent spectacular performances of Jamaican male and female athletes seem suspicious?
I mean that currently almost all the top sprinters in the world come from an island of 2.5 million people. What is especially noticeable is that their women got remarkably faster out of nowhere – which looks very like the East German PED phenomenon…