Although Jews tend to be “swarthy” if of European descent, with dark brown hair and brown eyes, there are natural blondes and redheads among them, as well as blue, grey, and green eyes. The genetic pool for Jews has never been sealed off, both due to conversion as well as, shall we say, involuntary encounters with outsiders.
As evidence - I myself was a redhead as a young child (my hair darkened as I grew up) and my eyes are still green. And I am Jewish. Not adopted. I’ve met a number of other blonde Jews, with light colored eyes. We’re minority, but we do exist.
I’ll agree that there’s a good bit of variation. My mother’s side of the family (and myself) share most of the “traditional” phenotypes, with very dark (verging on black) hair, the curls, but we all have greenish-hazel eyes. My father’s side of the family has a tendency (him, and my male cousins on his side of the family) to have full on afro tight curls, and two of my cousins have dirty blonde hair, though certainly on the dark side of that spectrum, with brown eyes.
That’s despite truly monocultural Ancestry.com tests of 99+% “Eastern European Jew”.
[ Aside, my MiL fell in love with those sorts of tests, as she and her husband are European and Celtic mutts, and got tests for myself and my wife, and said my folks should do the same… my test kinda proved that my parents shouldn’t bother ]
The odds of having an IQ of 160 are about 1 in 31,000.
But if 2 parents who each have an IQ of 160 have a child together, the odds that the child’s IQ will be 160 or higher are something like ~500 to one. Far lower than the 31,000 to one seen among the general public, but still very unlikely. The chances are overwhelming that the child will be less intelligent than their parents.
Even if you select the people most genetically prone to a certain trait, their child will probably be less likely than their parents to have that trait because the parents will be 3+ standard deviations to the right on that trait.
It would take multiple generations of selective breeding among a large population to truly breed super athletes.
To be fair, a major reason is because the writers are normal humans, who can’t write superhuman geniuses very well.
Another reason is that the augmented people are almost always portrayed as the villains, and it’s harder to justify them losing if they are too superhuman intellectually. And as a culture we despise superior intelligence.
Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf have a boy and a girl; the boy plays baseball, in college and on the German national team - so above average athletically, but not world-class like his parents.
There was a commercial some years back featuring a grade-school-age actor pretending to be their son and playing on par with a young adult tennis player. (The tagline, apropos for the subject of this thread, was “The right genes make all the difference” though it was talking about a financial company spun off from General Electric.)
Regarding the Olympics, I’d guess even in the absence of contraceptives, the broad variety of sports would make “super-athlete breeding” less than successful. I mean, if a powerlifter hooks up with a springboard diver, what would the kids be genetically suited for? Is there some sport that the offspring of a luger and a biathlete would do well in?
Not well, judging by how various successful minorities have been treated over the years.
At least those boys get the chance of a normal life, but they have to be rejected by their families, and lose everything they’ve ever known in the process. Meanwhile the girls get married off to older men before they reach adulthood and, I assume, are expected to have as many babies as possible with no choice in any of it.
Shows how much polygamy sucks for both (the majority of) men and for women.
It’s not rare for Germans to have dark eyes and hair anyway, especially in Bavaria. Hitler was targeting Jews based on ethnicity, not looks. If these genetic testing databases had existed then, it’s probable the Nazis would have tried to use them to identify various kinds of ‘undesirables’.
I’d think that in today’s world, the deciding factors probably wouldn’t be genetic.
I mean, even if JJ Watt (very successful pro football player) & Kealia Ohai’s(pro women’s soccer player) children* are athletic, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to be good football or soccer players just because their parents were those things.
BUT… if they chose to participate in those sports, they’d have built-in elite level coaching to some extent, as well as a huge network of sports connections and influence to draw on, as well as a large degree of name recognition within those sports. Those sorts of things are going to make for more successful children in those sports than mere genetics.
And like you say, a lot of those athletic pairings are like Watt & Ohai- a huge defensive lineman and a relatively small soccer player. But I don’t think that Servando Carrasco and Alex Morgan’s (both pro soccer players) kids are going to have some kind of special genetic soccer mojo, but they’ll absolutely have the non-genetic kind.
It’s a matter of continually refining the system that’s in place for producing and finding the best athletes. The refinements are in diet, sports medicine, training, and “analytics”, which may be the newest addition to all the others. Coaching and training is also continuously improving along with the technology used to analyze what a particular athlete is doing and how he or she can do it better.
In real life, my reform Jewish Rabbi asked my and my intended to get tested for Tay Sach’s before he would agree to marry us. That’s not really eugenics, though, because no one is “culled”, it’s just that people who both have the gene are discouraged from marrying each other.
I also know a Russian who didn’t marry his first sweetheart because she was rH negative and he was rH positive.
We tried to bred Maradona’s daughter with Sergio “Kun” Aguero to get the Kwisatz Haderach but their son, Benjamin Aguero, doesn’t play particularily well.
May be if Messi did his duty and finally had a daughter we could match her with Benjamin and see what happens…
Nomar Garciaparra (MLB) and Mia Hamm (Soccer) have three children, no reports on their athletic prowess.
Mikeala Shiffrin is engaged to Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, both World Cup champion alpine racers. My experience with ski racing families is that good skiers’ kids are also good skiers with many of the advantages that come from being immersed in that world. The pressure on their kids will be exceedingly high.
Barney Ward was a highly successful equestrian in show jumping. His son McLain went into the same sport, with equal success, and has been on the US Olympic team in show jumping.
Whatever genetic advantage in physical ability there might be is likely overshadowed by being raised in the sport and getting top-notch training on top-notch horses.
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