Based on a novel, by the way
If the rumours about what all goes on in the Olympic village every four years are true, that’s another potential source of super-athletes.
I would say yes, it does. That is one of the defining features of eugenics.
I have only ever seen two Jews with blonde hair and blue eyes. Both were adopted. Besides which, any Jew with blonde haor and blue eyes could reasonably be expected to not break their poor Yiddishe mameh’s heart and marry another Jew. Thus, they have sellf selected out of the Aryan breeding program. Not exterminating the Japanese was a matter of practicality. Japan was needed as an ally. Whether Germany would have been content making Europe or part of it ‘racially pure’ or whether it would have eventually tried to wipe out Asians afte the Axis won the war, I cannot say.
OK, that’s fine then. Under that stricter definition, selective breeding to maintain a heritage would not qualify as eugenics. I was using a looser sense of the word. Sorry for any ambiguity.
No biggie.
[Raises hand]. Not adopted. And I’ve known hundreds like me.
Huh. I retract my previous post.
Back to the OP.
It’s plausible for a hobbyist to breed e.g. mice towards smart or fast or crumpled ears or whatever. Because over the hobbyist’s <~70 year participation in the hobby they can breed ~700 generations. And because each generation is so fecund with ~10 offspring per female per pregnancy, they can cull 90% of each litter & keep the experiment rolling forward.
Now consider that same thing w humans. One litter per year of about 1.05 offspring per litter starting after a 15 year sexual maturation period? Over the lifetime of your experimenter you’d get 5 generations, tops
Total non-starter.
Are humans breedable? Sure. Over a span of millennia. As Calvin famously said: “Who’s got that kind of time?”
This is why fruit flies are often used in research. IIRC you go through a generation just a few days.
ISTM that if one were to clandestinely and effectively sabotage all the contraception methods in an Olympic Village …
[Ah. Ninja’d above. Alas…]
I saw this in between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the Internet, so I have no idea where it was published, but I actually find the following scenario totally believable.
East German Olympic athletes married each other in numbers that probably wouldn’t have existed in nature (people from other countries noticed it too) and after communism collapsed, many of the marriages ended in divorce, or were even annulled. You guessed it - the East German government arranged those marriages, hoping to produce future generations of super-athletes. That turned out not to work out so well, because a huge percentage of the marriages were childless (at least, with each other, KWIM?) and quite a few of them weren’t even consummated, either.
KWIM = know what I mean
This was also the “Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman” era.
There may be natural examples of this by looking at cultures where athletic ability is part of the courting ritual. One example is the Maasai:
Since the person who can jump the highest has the best chance of mating, they have the best chance of passing on their genes. That seems like a culture which would produce people who are optimized for jumping high. Indeed, that’s what we see. The Maasai are tall and are good jumpers. Basketball teams have recruited the Maasai for that ability. Comparing typical jumping ability with the Maasai would likely give an indication of the best jumping improvement we could achieve through optimized genetic engineering.
Depending how these polygamists picked the teenage boys to kick out (dumped by the side of the road like an unwanted puppy, my god) it could possibly qualify. They’d probably be selecting for obedience and unquestioning faith rather than sporting ability, though.
Abortions for genetic disorders, and PGT are also eugenics. If we can identify enough genes affecting athletic ability, parents could potentially select IVF embryos for that in the future.
AFAIK running speed and muscle composition are approximately as heritable as intelligence. Financial success isn’t a trait, but provided the children live in a similar environment to the parents, many of the traits that led to a parent’s financial success or lack thereof can be passed on and lead to similar results in the kids. However, there is an effect called regression towards the mean, whereby kids tend to be closer to the average than their parents, and this is more pronounced the farther from the mean the parents are - outliers like Olympians and tech geniuses are extremely far from the mean, and their kids are commonly talented in the same areas, but not to the same degree.
Another example of eugenics in fiction would be the Howard Families in Robert Heinlein’s stories, the result of a project starting in the 19th century to select for longer lifespans. If even works somewhat, although eventually medicine based life extension outstripped the results.
In real life some Orthodox Jews who practice arranged marriage make sure that people with recessive genes for Tay Sach’s disease don’t marry.
Also as far as real life goes besides the other issues mentioned a big one is that genetically speaking humans are a fairly low diversity species. And selective breeding can only select for genes that exist, not add new ones, which is yet another reason humans are a poor target for it. We just don’t have that much variation to work with.
Comparatively speaking, humans are a genetically homogeneous species. Although a small number of genetic variants are found more frequently in certain geographic regions or in people with ancestry from those regions, this variation accounts for a small portion (~15%) of human genome variability. The majority of variation exists within the members of each human population. For comparison, rhesus macaques exhibit 2.5-fold greater DNA sequence diversity compared to humans.[
That’s the premise of Heinlein’s novel Methuselah’s Children where the trait being bred for, over multiple secretive generations, was longevity rather than athletic prowess. The Howard families eventually hijacked a colony ship and escaped Earth after they’d revealed their existence and were persecuted for withholding their presumed secret to immortality.
One wonders how society would react to any line of human beings bred for superiority over all other humans.
Apparently we’d build them pyramids and palaces. Guess the criteria for “superiority” aren’t that hard to meet.
A common theme in Scifi breeding programs (and reflected in this thread!) is that in trying to breed a better human, we almost always are trying to breed for our most basic traits. Why do so many augments / Drakka / Morthans / etc. go for super strength, super speed, super agility, with maybe slightly smarter as an afterthought or after-affect to support the above?
We could be breeding for superior understanding (both intellectual and emotional), problem solving, emotional stability, micro-dexterity, energy efficiency, or other traits that are likely needed by a social and civilized structure. NOT one that enables us to beat each other better in hand-to-hand when we’re push-button killers.
There are a few novels (Octagonal Raven for one) that look at this, and make the point that any engineering is based on what we think right now people will need, or at least, what will attract people to PAY for, with predictable consequences. Or, in one of the examples I cited above, the Morthan Alliance, if you build a better breed of humans, with increased intellect, power and physical superiority, and keep telling them that they are More Than human, well, that’s a recipe to being replaced.
My understanding is that the main criterion for kicking boys out of the FLDS communities is this: They showed interest in a similarly-aged girl who has already been set up with a man who is quite likely old enough to be her grandfather. Quite a few have been taken in by households in their region, usually Mormon but not always, and while we all know that the Mormon communities are not without their share of problems, these boys are astonished to learn that in the outside world, people really do have adequate food, clothing, and shelter; they can pick their careers and spouses; they can go to school for as long as their intellect allows; and they can also have their children when they want them.
Or we could breed and train and manipulate to get it all-Clark Savage Jr.