What it takes to be superhuman

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-5792553/Fascinating-new-book-reveals-takes-superhuman.html  Quoting (excerpts):

Are champions born or made? Is it blood, sweat and tears, pushy parents, or simply in the genes?

* Rowan Hooper interviewed people with extreme mental and physical abilities
* He argues the genetics of extreme performance individuals are underestimated

Hooper is persuasive in arguing that the genetic element in extreme performance is generally underestimated, or, at least, it is in the many popular American books with titles such as Talent Is Overrated. As Hooper points out, part of the American Dream is that anyone can achieve whatever they desire just through sheer hard work and willpower. So there is a big market for popular science books which confirm that view . . . the fashionable view that extreme success has little to do with genetics and is overwhelmingly the product of effort.

This has been popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, which rested on the theory that if you practised something for 10,000 hours, you could reach the highest level (for example, in musical performance). If only it were so simple. As Hooper points out, Zach Hambrick, of the Expertise Lab at Michigan State University, took eight studies of musical expertise and practise, analysed the data from all of them ‘and found that the amount of practise put in accounted for 30 per cent of the variance in performance’. I don’t know how he measured ‘variation in performance’ — musical performance is not quantifiable in the way chess results are — but if this figure is remotely accurate, it suggests 70 per cent of performance differentiation is to do with something that we might describe as ‘natural ability’.

And twisting the knife into the ‘we can all be winners’ brigade, Hooper goes on to argue that the latest research suggests even the propensity to practise and work hard can be explained genetically.

However, it’s not all genetics, as he acknowledges . . . Hungarian educational psychologist Laszlo Polgar home-schooled his three daughters with the single-minded objective of producing chess champions. All three achieved Grandmaster results and the youngest, Judit, became the strongest woman chess player of all time. She beat Garry Kasparov in one memorable game, which must have given her particular pleasure, as he had dismissed the Polgar sisters as ‘trained dogs’.

Actually, Kasparov — widely regarded as the greatest chess player in history — would approve of Hooper’s notion of diligence as itself in part an inherited gift. Kasparov rejected the idea that anyone could work as hard as he had done to become world champion and declared: ‘The ability to work hard for days on end is a talent.’

I was just talking about this, last week!

The neurologist that is training me to do nerve conduction studies told me that I am doing a very good job and that I will only need to do about 10,000 more tests to be an expert.
He was exaggerating...it is not brain surgery.

To perform this test you definitely need skill, that comes with practice but part of my catching it quickly maybe an inherent gift. I can be very good at getting on people's nerves

A big part of excelling at anything, is loving what you are doing and working hard at it.

Suppose, in future, all babies were genetically 'edited' so that everyone grew up to be healthy, intelligent, athletic and good looking. What kind of society would that be? Any different to what Western societies are like now?

Eugenic laws were on the books until the 1970s, in the United States. This is nothing new to western society. Planned parenthood sprang from these ideas along with abortion, personalized medicine, genetics
I suppose these practices are a lesser degree of what was accepted in the past. Some how modernized, scientific more palatable....a good thing

I hope that America learned from from WW11, the idea of some sort of man made utopia made by improving the human species just ain't gonna happen.

It is a very slippery slope. Who has the right to decide who is fit enough to breed?

Natures laws are never fair. Not everyone is a winner in life .

That is why people that are born with exceptional talent, intelligence, health or looks are said to have a gift.

Some coutries like Sweden and Germany had eugenics policies during decades.
I wonder in which extent their successful society is due to this decision.


Genetic play obviously a role in succees, as work do.

I think human genetic modification will happen to some extent. Already there is screening of embryos for 'implanted' pregnancies (I just forget what they call it). Once they have mastered the elimination of serious genetic illnesses they will turn the procedure to cosmetic and fitness matters, probably even allowing parents to choose their children's skin, eye and hair colour. Maybe in a hundred years.

Morally, I don't see it as a bad thing. I think the current practice of allowing the birth mother to be different from the genetic mother is a far worse case of disrupting natural identity.

Embryo selection is much easier to do then gene therapy.  It is not all that uncommon, but it can be expensive if insurance does not cover it.  It is not for everyone.

I can understand why infertile  couples or individuals known to carry a heritable genetic trait for a disease would choose IVF. The drive to reproduce can be very strong in some people.
The problem to me is, I believe that life begins at conception.  It is a moral issue disposing of embryos that are not deemed desirable.
It cheapens human life.

Many times  women are implanted with numerous embryos, hoping one or two will grow.  If more develop then expected, the parents may decide to abort.  Using embryo selection for gender is a very selfish thing to do.

Now, Gene therapy is something that will definitely become more common as the price goes down and advances are made.  It is not natural thing, but when you think about it, neither is lot of the technology being used in medicine today.

Diseased people would likely die a natural death long before having the opportunity to reproduce their faulty genes.  All of our medical advances are not allowing Mother Nature to take her course.
A world without disease sound good.

It is definitely a complicated issue, reminds me of the book Brave New World.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6170137/Is-thought-knew-parenting-wrong-Geneticist-reveals-secret.html

* Professor Robert Plomin says DNA is the most important factor in all of us
* DNA accounts for at least half the variance in people’s psychological traits
* Plomin said DNA is fundamentally what makes us who we are in the long term

. . . Now, one of the country’s top psychologists and behavioural geneticists, Professor Robert Plomin, of King’s College London, offers an emphatic conclusion. It is drawn from 45 years of research and hundreds of studies. He says the single most important factor in each and every one of us — the very essence of our individuality — is our genetic make-up, our DNA.

The basic building blocks of life that we inherit from our parents are what determine who we are — not how much they loved us, read us books or which school they sent us to. DNA accounts for at least half the variance in people’s psychological traits, much more than any other single factor. Put simply, ‘nature’ trumps ‘nurture’ every time, and not just marginally, but by a long, long chalk. Our DNA, fixed and unchangeable, determines whether we have a predisposition not just to physical traits — from how tall we are to how much we weigh — but also to our intelligence and our psychology, from a tendency to depression to having resilience and grit.

Plomin’s revolutionary conclusion — outlined in a challenging and thought-provoking new book, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are — is a game-changer, he claims, with far-reaching implications for psychology and for society. He turns much conventional thinking on its head, controversially calling into question many basic assumptions, such as the value of formal education to change people’s lives.

It also undermines the parenting advice industry, the basis of all those groaning shelves of manuals telling us the right way to bring up our children and the disasters that will ensue if we get it wrong. These sell because every parent wants to think they can make a difference to their child, that they can help him or her with reading and arithmetic or teach them how to be kind or conscientious. But, says Plomin, there’s no hard evidence that this is true. On the contrary, our ability to read, to learn, to empathise and so on are all ruled primarily by our genes.

. . . Chicago-born Plomin’s startling conclusions come from two of his long-term studies. Over the course of 40 years, he tracked 250 adopted children in Colorado along with the birth parents who gave them their genes, and the adoptive parents who raised them. After moving to London in 1994, he launched a 20-year study of more than 12,000 pairs of twins. From these studies, it was possible to unravel the relative importance of genes as opposed to environment when it came to their development.

Millions of pieces of data were amassed from the parents, teachers and the children themselves, about psychological traits such as hyperactivity and inattention, talents such as school achievement and the ability to learn languages, and physical characteristics, such as the propensity to put on weight and become obese. From all this, he found overwhelming evidence that adopted children are similar to their birth parents, not the parents who raised them. Identical twins (ie, from a single egg and therefore with the same DNA) develop much more similarly to each other as compared with non-identical twins (from separate eggs and with different DNA).

The conclusion was clear — DNA makes us who we are. In the long term, the environment you grow up in has little impact on the way you turn out. Even stressful life events such as relationship break-ups, financial difficulties and illness don’t have the impact that people generally assume. In fact, what really matters in such situations is our genes, because it is our genes that determine how well or badly an individual deals with such setbacks. And whether we’re resilient to life’s catastrophes or cave in is determined by our DNA, too.

. . . All this leads Plomin to a conclusion that is hard to take: the family, he tells us, far from being the monolithic determinant of who we are, the bedrock from which we learn and grow, actually makes little difference to our personalities and the way we turn out. There are exceptions. Abuse, for example, can make huge differences to individuals, but because these instances are comparatively rare they do not alter the general finding that overall it is DNA that rules the roost. This, too, explains why siblings are often so different in personality and temperament from each other even though they grow up side by side — something that often has parents shaking their heads in frustration. ‘Why can’t you be hard-working like your sister?!’

. . .That, though, still leaves an important role for parents — to find out what their children do well and provide the opportunities for them to do it. What we should not do is try to change them into something they are not. ‘Each child is their own person genetically. We need to recognise and respect their genetic differences. If we go against the grain, we run the risk of damaging our relationship with them.’

. . .And the same, he insists, goes for schools — a theory that challenges the principles on which our education system is based. Schools, he says, matter in that they teach basic skills such as literacy and numeracy. They also dispense fundamental information about history, science, maths and culture. But choice of school makes very little difference to a child’s achievement. ‘Genetics is by far the major source of individual differences in school achievement.’ . . . What all schools should aspire to, he maintains, is to be places where children can learn to enjoy learning for its own sake, rather than frenetically teaching pupils to pass the exams that will improve the school’s standing in league tables.

Not that the influence of our DNA is confined to our early years when we’re growing up. Indeed, Plomin shows that it gets stronger as we get older. More and more, we revert to type. Yes, other factors impact on us, such as our relationships with partners, children and friends, our jobs and interests. All contribute to give life meaning. But they don’t fundamentally change who we are psychologically — our personality, our mental health and our cognitive abilities. Good and bad things happen to us, but eventually we rebound to our genetic trajectory. Many people, Plomin acknowledges, will be aghast at his ‘bold conclusion’.

. . . Plomin quotes with approval the observation of American comedian W.C. Fields: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.’ Because, ultimately, it’s more sensible to go with the genetic flow rather than trying to swim upstream. Equally, our DNA can tell us where our inborn talents lie, so that we do not waste them.

There was a telling example this week when former England captain Alastair Cook retired from Test cricket. In tribute, commentator Mike Atherton declared: ‘He made himself the best player he could be; he extracted every last ounce of his talent.’ Plomin’s radical new world may force us to bow to our genetic limits but, on the plus side, it will encourage us, like Alastair Cook, to do the best we can with the talents we’ve been given.

Ofc DNA plays a huge role in what makes an individual intelligent.
Environmental factors ,nurture only goes so far.
It is too bad that the liberal mind can not accept this , natural law....it drives them crazy to think that everyone is not the same. They tell themselves that anyone can be what ever they want to be. This is not true.

Sary wrote:Ofc  DNA plays a huge role in what makes an individual intelligent.
Environmental factors ,nurture only goes so far.  
It is too bad that the liberal mind can not accept this , natural law....it drives them crazy to think that everyone is not the same.  They tell themselves that anyone can be what ever they want to be. This is not true.

 

I just saw this:



I wonder how many of those I have.

^ Have you got a link for that, OP?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html  Quoting:

. . . Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases.

. . . I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.

Neon Knight wrote:^ Have you got a link for that, OP?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html  Quoting:

. . . Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases.

. . . I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.

No. I found it on a dissident site, but it has the name of it in the bottom.

I don't know any Africa Africans, but I do know some very smart and successful African Americans. I see intelligent ,educated brown people every day.
Not sure if race has anything to do with it.