Is there anyone in the world (a country, rogue state, sports fan, mad scientist, evil billionaire, whatever) trying to breed better athletes for fun and profit? Like seducing Olympic athletes and splicing their genes to make designer babies, or just enforcing a purity of lineage over time to try to create a really fit super-family consisting entirely of slightly inbred Olympians?
Is there any estimated upper limit at how far we could push the performance of the human machine if, say, ethics were completely disregarded and money were no factor? How many generations would it take before we could create someone capable of running a 2-minute mile?
There was a movie back in 1979 called “Goldengirl” about such an engineered athlete participating in the Moscow Olympics, starring Susan Anton and James Coburn. More people would have heard of it except for one small problem-after the movie was made (but before it was released), the U.S. decided to boycott the Moscow Olympics.
Eugenics generally fell out of favor after the holocaust. Additionally, making sure the next generation follows the plan is very hard. It becomes harder with each generation.
Well, hopefully genocide is rarer now (I’m not actually sure about that), but selective breeding (“positive eugenics”) is still relatively common, no, especially among religious sects like the FLDS?
Perhaps as a comparison, the breeding programs for developing super athletic animals might be useful. Animals like greyhound dogs and race horses are focused simply on producing the fastest animal with a minimal concern for their welfare. If something like that was done with humans, perhaps a similar gain in performance could be achieved.
There was also a story in Omni about engineered athletes from the same year called The Mickey Mouse Olympics (available online but I don’t know the legality of it, so no links). Played for comedy, every major power is entering blatantly genetically engineered athletes and lying about it, while entering complaints about other nations doing the same thing.
Also the title is because Disney is hosting the Olympics, complete with an Olympic symbol where two of the circles are Mickey’s ears.
Can you link to that specific section of the Wikipedia article? It is rather long. I read their doctrines and did not see anything about eugenics. Plural marriage is not the same as euegenics.
It’s not a plural marriage thing, but rather due to their very closed-off communities and the in-breeding that results from it. The Wikipedia page only brief discusses it in the “birth defects” section. Another BBC article on it: The polygamous town facing genetic disaster. Having multiple partners by itself doesn’t limit genetic diversity; what happened in the FLDS is that only certain men favored by their leaders were allowed to reproduce (their system was called placement marriages), and the kids they made were similarly recycled into the same system for the next generation (or sometimes even the current one… their leader would take 12-year-olds as wives and reproduce with them, for example).
The Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven is a good read on this particular religious group, if you’re interested, as well as the book Escape by Carolyn Jessop, a woman who lived in and escaped from one such community.
Probably we should spin off another topic to discuss this if it’s interesting enough to you. There’s been many books and shows made about this particular group. But my understanding is that while they are one of the more famous ones, in-group breeding is not particularly uncommon among smaller religious sects (Edit: See Endogamy - Wikipedia). It’s a big enough topic to stand on its own aside from super-athletes, probably.
That does sound interesting. But it is not eugenics. Eugenics would be picking people for a certain traitor group of traits and having those people reproduce. The offspring would be screened for the desired trait and so forth.
There is no trait being selected for here. A man gained power and took multiple wives. He allowed certain other men to take multiple wives. There was likely a plan to start a dynasty where the leader’s son would be the next leader. That isn’t eugenics.It’s a standard cult.
This has been covered on the board before. On top of the general ickiness of it, the biggest barrier is just that there’s no money in it. Humans take a shockingly long time to reach maturity vs other animals and they’re far more resource intensive to rear during that time. You’d need a centuries long project involving thousands of participants and there’s no conceivable outcome at the end of it that is better than just throwing more people at the problem vs better.
On a more personal note, The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the few historical clusters in history where extreme amounts of sorting have created natural experiments for eugenics that sidesteps many of the ethical barriers of forced eugenics. We’re going on roughly the 3rd generation of that experiment and I’m personally acquainted with pairings of high potential people (not famous people, just ones who have a track record from young of being on the far end of the bell curve) and I’ve played with their kids. Their kids are… fine? Maybe a little above average but just kinda normal kids.
The people who built the second generation of Silicon Valley largely weren’t the kids of the first generation and the people who build the third generation will only minorly draw from the pool of the second. America owes far more to Silicon Valley’s success to being a beacon of immigration and an open and welcome home of weirdos and oddballs from tiny Southern towns and rural Indian villages, from those billions of people produces more reliable great talent than any conceivable eugenics program, even if all ethics were set aside.
To the extent that Silicon Valley and American competitiveness fails is that it no longer becomes the first choice for people like that and that system is falling apart in front of our very eyes.
This seems like the right starting point to answer this question. Of course, human generations are much longer. You probably need to wait until the kids are at least 15 or so to breed them, if only to know which ones seem “most successful”.
For clarity, the reason this is a genetic issue (both in terms of birth defects and eugenics) is that it’s the same small group of descendants repeatedly breeding with each other, and their own children. They are selected for the trait of being descendants of the same original bloodline, largely from one ancestor (Warren Jeffs).
It’s not the same as a cult who lures in outsiders to breed with them (like in minor spoiler: Midsommar). It’s more like if you took Genghis Khan and locked him in a big petri dish with 5 women and came back 100 years later. They’re all his descendants, and all selected for genetically & culturally for being a part of that lineage. They don’t typically reproduce with outsiders, and when they do, it’s typically because one escaped the petri dish and left to live elsewhere (so still not affecting the remaining FLDS members much).
The breeders are:
Selected for genetically by being part of the same close lineage of cloistered descendants disconnected from the outside world
Bred repeatedly with other members of the same small group
Whose offspring are then bred again within that same small group
If I’m understanding you right, you’re comparing the heritability of intelligence & financial success with physical traits like running speed & muscle composition?
Are they comparable in terms of how heritable they are? (Genuinely asking… I don’t know.)
The sci fi series Dark Angel had a secret eugenics cult. I cannot recall their name. They had been at it for a long time, Their was some kind of test for teenagers that was lethal to those who were genetically unfit. Of all the things on the show, this was the the most implausible. Yeah, it could last a generation or two. But centuries?
The series Andromeda also had a eugenics group. The Neitzcheans were followers of the philosopher, atheist, and some genetic modification had been done on their ancestors. They were generally stronger, faster, tougher and smarter than normal humans. They alos had three bone blades growing out of their forearms.
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That is not a trait. When (I cannot remember his name) bred dachshunds from hunting hounds one of the desired traits was short legs. Who ever bred sharpeis selected for excess wrinkly skim. The Nazis wanted tall people with blonde hair and blue eyes.
What trait or group of traits were Jeffs and his followers selcting for? How many sons did Jeff have? Did he pick his successor because that kid had the most of whatever the desired trait was?
It was common when I was younger back in the 60’s to claim that black atheletes were better than white ones due to selective breeding during salvery a hundred years prior. Some people people have started saying that out loud again.
It happens all the time, on a very small scale. Think about various sports stars who have had thousands of partners over their lives: Clearly, there are a lot of women who want to have sex with, say, Wilt Chamberlain. On some level, conscious or subconscious, this is because they consider Chamberlain to be the ideal of manhood, and want to have offspring who have similar traits to him.
I don’t think eugenics has to be purely based on observable phenotypes, much less genotypes, does it? Sure, that may be a vague excuse used by the genocidal types… but using the Nazi example, blonde-haired-blue-eyed Jews were still targeted, while the Japanese were not. It’s an ideology thing more than strict genetic science of any sort.
Jeffs and his offspring were generally selecting for lineage the same way the Nazis were (sometimes) selecting for Aryan descent. They wanted to keep the bloodline pure, but unlike the Nazis, they actually succeeded (and caused the genetic conditions). Of course, like the Nazis, I wouldn’t be surprised if they also selectively enforced or overlooked the criteria based on their whims.
I had the impression that China encourages athletes to attend specialized sports elementary schools and high schools (and universities) where they will naturally meet and socialize with other people playing the same sport. And there are stories that Yao Ming’s (very tall) parents were introduced by government officials and encouraged to marry.
