The Breeder's Equation, regression to the mean, and eugenics

---

R = h² S

Annual Edge Question, Gregory Cochran

"R is the response to selection, S is the selection differential, and h² is the narrow-sense heritability. This is the workhorse equation for quantitative genetics. The selective differential S, is the difference between the population average and the average of the parental population (some subset of the total population). Almost everything is moderately to highly heritable, from height and weight to psychological traits.

Consider IQ. Imagine a set of parents with IQs of 120, drawn from a population with an average IQ of 100. Suppose that the narrow-sense heritability of IQ (in that population, in that environment) is 0.5. The average IQ of their children will be 110. That’s what is usually called regression to the mean.

Do the same thing with a population whose average IQ is 85. We again choose parents with IQs of 120, and the narrow-sense heritability is still 0.5. The average IQ of their children will be 102.5—they regress to a lower mean.

You can think of it this way. In the first case, the parents have 20 extra IQ points. On average, 50% of those points are due to additive genetic factors, while the other 50% is the product of good environmental luck. By the way, when we say ‘environmental”, we mean “something other than additive genetics”. It doesn’t look as if the usual suspects—the way in which you raise your kids, or the school they attend—contribute much to this ‘environmental’ variance, at least for adult IQ. We know what it’s not, but not much about what it is, although it must include factors like test error and being hit on the head with a ball-peen hammer.

The kids get the good additive genes, but have average ‘environmental’ luck—so their average IQ is 110. The luck (10 pts worth) goes away

The 120-IQ parents drawn from the IQ-85 population have 35 extra IQ points, half from good additive genes and half from good environmental luck. But in the next generation, the luck goes away… so they drop 17.5 points.

The next point is that the luck only goes away once. If you took those kids from the first group, with average IQs of 110, and dropped them on a friendly uninhabited island, they would eventually get around to mating —and the next generation would also have an IQ of 110. With tougher selection, say by kidnapping a year’s worth of National Merit Finalists, you could create a new ethny with far higher average intelligence than any existing. Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial."

50th anniversary of the Moynihan report

 

In 1963, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for whites was 3%; for blacks, it was 23%. In 2008, the out-of-wedlock birth  rates were 41% for Americans overall, and 72% for blacks.

 

NYT

"Fifty years ago this month, Democrats made a historic mistake.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time a federal official, wrote a famous report in March 1965 on family breakdown among African-Americans. He argued presciently and powerfully that the rise of single-parent households would make poverty more intractable.

“The fundamental problem,” Moynihan wrote, is family breakdown. In a follow-up, he explained: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families ... never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.” 

Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist. He himself had grown up in a single-mother household and worked as a shoeshine boy at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street in Manhattan, yet he was accused of being aloof and patronizing, and of “blaming the victim.”

... 

In 2013, 71 percent of black children in America were born to an unwed mother, as were 53 percent of Hispanic children and 36 percent of white children.

Indeed, a single parent is the new norm. At some point before they turn 18, a majority of all American children will likely live with a single mom and no dad.

...

[C]hildren of unmarried moms are roughly five times as likely to live in poverty as children of married couples.

...

[G]rowing up with just one biological parent reduces the chance that a child will graduate from high school by 40 percent, according to an essay by Sara McLanahan of Princeton and Christopher Jencks of Harvard. They point to the likely mechanism: “A father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule-breaking, delinquency and illegal drug use.” These effects are greater on boys than on girls.

...

What can be done?

In line with Moynihan’s thinking, we can support programs to boost the economic prospects for poorer families. We can help girls and young women avoid pregnancy (30 percent of American girls become pregnant by age 19). If they delay childbearing, they’ll be more likely to marry and form stable families, notes Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution."

Whoa! How'd the eugenic thinking sneak in there?

Nashville prosecutor fired for offering sterilization as an alternative to long-term incarceration

Jasmine Randers, who most people probably wouldn't want for a mother.

ABC News

"A Nashville prosecutor has been fired after reports surfaced that he made sterilization of women part of plea negotiations in some cases.

Former Assistant District Attorney Brian Holmgren confirmed Wednesday that he was fired from the Davidson County District Attorney's office. He declined to comment specifically on his dismissal, and officials would not say what prompted his firing.

The firing came after The Associated Press reported that the invasive surgery was part of plea bargain talks at least four times in the past five years in child abuse and neglect cases. The most recent of those cases was first reported by The Tennessean newspaper.

That case involved a woman with a 20-year history of mental illness who had been charged with neglect after her 5-day-old baby mysteriously died. Her defense attorney said Holmgren wouldn't go forward with a plea deal to keep the woman out of prison unless she had the surgery.

District Attorney General Glenn Funk, who came to the office in September, banned the practice after the mentally ill woman's lawyer complained to him late last year. Funk said he was not aware of any other cases.

The cases evoke a dark corner of American history where the mentally ill, minorities and those deemed "deficient" were forced to undergo surgery so they could not have children.

Holmgren, who has been both praised and fiercely criticized for his aggressive courtroom tactics on behalf of children, said he routinely asked abusers and mothers who gave birth to infants who test positive for drugs to go on birth control. A court could not order someone to take birth control, so defendants in those cases would have to consent to such a condition.

But the case of 36-year-old Jasmine Randers, a woman with a history of fleeing mental institutions and the people who tried to help her, proved particularly vexing, he said.

"I had significant concerns that this woman could cause harm to a fetus or a baby if she got pregnant again," Holmgren said. He didn't trust her to take birth control, and her history worried him.

Randers stabbed herself in the stomach when she was pregnant in 2004 and then was arrested at the Nashville airport after making threats to her unborn child when she was pregnant again in 2012, he said. She was under court supervision for her mental illness when she fled her home state of Minnesota and gave birth to a baby in 2012 that would die five days later in Nashville.

The cause of the girl's death was undetermined, but Holmgren said investigators could not find any sign that she had provided diapers or formula for the infant in Nashville after giving birth to the girl in Arkansas.

Randers has since been found not guilty by reason of insanity and is confined to an institution.

With other cases, Holmgren said he has never told a woman that she has to undergo sterilization to get a plea deal, but he acknowledged it was discussed on some occasions. He said sometimes a defendant would want to undergo the procedure."

The Daily Tennessean has a good article with details of the Randers case.

Vision of the 21st Century: Give The Useless People Drugs and Videogames!

Below is an interesting conversation between the author of Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari) and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. They note that a large segment of the population is no longer needed for either cannon fodder or factory work. Pretty soon those self-driving vehicles are going to put truck drivers out of work, too. What to do with all "the useless people," they wonder? Harari suggests drugs and videogames. Could this be the 21st Century's "bread and circuses"? We are already legalizing marijuana in the U.S. (a drug that is noted for making users content with their present circumstance). How soon until we start handing out XBoxes to every high school drop out? My guess is that the elites will figure out a way to keep "the useless people" from breeding in the first place. Will people agree to long-term contraceptive implants in exchange for a marijuana dispensary card and an Xbox + GameFly subscription? Throw in some satellite t.v. and a flatscreen and I think a large segment of the population would go for it.

 

 

Edge

"There are fundamental reasons why we should take this very seriously, because generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it's the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.

But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it's done, it's over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.

And once most people are no longer really necessary, for the military and for the economy, the idea that you will continue to have mass medicine is not so certain. Could be. It's not a prophecy, but you should take very seriously the option that people will lose their military and economic value, and medicine will follow. [He means that medical advances and resources will be focused on the elites, not the masses.]

...

KAHNEMAN: Yes. I really like that phrase of "people not being necessary," can you elaborate on this dystopia? It's a new phrase for me. ... You have thought about it deeply, can you tell us about people becoming unnecessary, economically, and unnecessary militarily? What will that do?

HARARI: [He makes a great point here that computers/robots don't need to achieve consciousness to replace humans, they just need intelligence -- of the sort exhibited by the self-driving car.]

And this is where we have to take seriously, the possibility that even though computers will still be far behind humans in many different things, as far as the tasks that the system needs from us are concerned, most of the time computers will be able to do better than us. ...

HARARI: Well, again, I am an historian, I am not a biologist, I'm not a computer scientist, I am not in a position to say whether all these ideas are realizable or not. I can just look from the view of the historian and say what it looks from there. So the social and philosophical and political implications are the things that interest me most. Basically, if any of these trends are going to actually be fulfilled, then the best I can do is quote Marx and say that everything solid melts into air.

KAHNEMAN: What I find difficult to imagine is that as people are becoming unnecessary, the translation of that into sort of 20th-century terms is mass unemployment. Mass unemployment means social unrest. And it means there are things going to happen, processes going to happen in society, as a result of people becoming superfluous, and that is a gradual process, people becoming superfluous.

...

HARARI: Yes, the social side is the more important and more difficult one. I don't have a solution, and the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. I don't think we have an economic model for that. My best guess, which is just a guess, is that food will not be a problem. With that kind of technology, you will be able to produce food to feed everybody. The problem is more boredom, and what to do with people, and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.

My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most ... it's already happening. Under different titles, different headings, you see more and more people spending more and more time, or solving their inner problems with drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs. But this is just a wild guess.

India pays poor women to be sterilized, kills them sometimes

American billionaire Melinda Gates says, "Cute kid -- now get your tubes tied;
there are too many people in the Third World."

 

Reuters

"Sterilisation is the most popular form of birth control in India. Encouraged by cash incentives[$10 for the woman, less for the "health worker" who brings her to the "sterilization camp"], about 4 million people a year undergo surgery. Almost all are women.

In Chhattisgarh, one of India's poorest states, the government had a target to carry out 165,000 female sterilisations and 26,000 male sterilisations in 2013-14, according to government documents.

Some members of India's medical establishment and activists say targets make the sterilisation programme coercive.

Investigating officer S.N. Shukla said all the women who were operated on Saturday had signed written consent. That is in line with national standards that also say consent should be not obtained under coercion or while the patient is sedated.

Tubectomies are considered major surgeries, but doctors often exceed limits. Before guidelines were set there were reports of doctors performing 200 surgeries a day, said Suneeta Mittal, head of gynaecology at Fortis Memorial Research Institute near New Delhi.

Operations at the camps are conducted in minutes, with little time to maintain hygiene. Nearly 600 deaths were reported between 2009 and 2012, according to the government."

 India is soon going to surpass China as the world's most populous nation. Twelve women just died from this procedure, apparently from septic shock -- their doctor tied the tubes of 83 women that day and probably never re-sterilized his instruments. Perhaps this is not surprising for a country that has to have a public service campaign to encourage people to use toilets.

North Carolina to pay reparations to eugenics victims

 

Pacific Standard

"From the early decades of the 20th century until 1974, 32 states in the union mandated the sterilization of more than 65,000 citizens. At the behest of government eugenics boards, girls and women had their tubes tied or uteri removed, and boys and men their vasa deferentia snipped because they had been deemed unfit to reproduce. Still others came under the scalpel of private doctors, and this second group makes the calculations difficult—65,000 represents only the number of sterilizations where there was municipal paperwork.

In 2013, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Eugenics Compensation statute, and last week the state’s department of commerce began the long-awaited disbursement of financial reparations to victims of sterilization. Two hundred twenty living victims will receive checks of $20,000 each—220 checks, out of 768 claims. Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina sterilized at least 7,600 people. However mortifying the disparity here, we must give the Assembly credit for passing legislation that no other state has so far brought to a vote; by contrast, California has kept positively mum about its own similar history, which accounts for a third of all American sterilizations."

Oddly, the author of this piece later seems to laud Roe v. Wade as an advance in civil rights, rather than regard it as a continuation of eugenics by other means. The disparity in abortion rates between high and low income women tells the tale. Nearly 70% of U.S. women receiving abortions earn less than $22,000/year. The federal government, by funding Planned Parenthood ($360 million in 2009), the nation's largest abortion provider (over 300,000 in 2009), happily supports the effort to limit reproduction among the poor. And don't forget the 2.4 million Americans who are currently incarcerated -- long-term incapacitation tends to depress fertility rates as well.

Virginia brings back eugenics!

I'm pretty sure that the judge wants to sterilize him because of the neck tattoo.

RICHMOND, Va.— A Virginia man who has fathered children with several women has agreed to get a vasectomy to reduce his prison term by up to five years in a child endangerment case that has evoked the country’s dark history of forced sterilization.

None of the charges against Jessie Lee Herald, 27, involved a sexual offense. Shenandoah County assistant prosecutor Ilona White said her chief motive in making the extraordinarily unusual offer was keeping Herald from fathering more than the seven children he has by at least six women.

“He needs to be able to support the children he already has when he gets out,” she said, adding that Herald and the state both benefit from the deal, first reported by the Northern Virginia Daily.

Though Herald willingly — if reluctantly, according to his attorney — signed on to the deal, the agreement immediately calls to mind the surgical sterilizations carried out in Virginia and dozens of other states during the 20th century under the discredited* pseudoscience called eugenics, said Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor.

...

Some 8,000 people deemed genetically inferior or deficient were forcibly sterilized in Virginia from the 1920s to about 1970. Many other states also had eugenics programs but abandoned them after World War II when forced sterilizations became closely associated with Nazi Germany’s racial purity efforts.

*Discredited by whom? When? What's your citation? Which studies apparently"discredited" eugenics? The same studies that "discredited" Freud? I think what the law professor (who wouldn't know anything about science or "pseudoscience") meant is that eugenics is no longer fashionable. Eugenics is alive and well in the United States (see the +90% rate of elective terminations after in utero diagnosis of Down's Syndrome).

Cloning Athletes -- Part 3

"Don't worry about the clones."

The question isn't whether we should clone animals, but rather when are you going to notice that people have been busy cloning animals for a long time. Cloning isn't going away and it is just a matter of time until we start cloning humans. I wouldn't be surprised if human cloning started with elite athletes. From NBC online:

"In a lawsuit set for trial Tuesday in Texas, the horsemen are asking a federal judge to force the American Quarter Horse Association to register cloned horses and their offspring, arguing that it is violating antitrust law by refusing to do so.

A decision favoring the plaintiffs -- Jason Abraham of Canadian, Texas, and Gregg Veneklasen of Amarillo -- could clear the way for clones to compete in sanctioned quarter horse races at scores of racetracks in the U.S. and elsewhere. The clones would in many cases be genetic duplicates of quarter horse royalty like Tailor Fit, a two-time world champion -- and a gelding -- who now has a young copy named Pure Tailor Fit.

Five cloned foals 

Debate is raging over how cloning could impact the American Quarter Horse -- an agile horse bred for speed rather than stamina. Quarter horse racing, which generated more than $300 million in wagering at U.S. racetracks in 2012, is the third most popular form of equine racing after thoroughbred and standardbred racing, and quarter horses also are prized in rodeo events for their athleticisim. Stallions like Pure Taylor Fit can bring in $1,500 or more per mating.

Whether or not the pro-cloning argument carries the day in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo, equine clones will be appearing before the year is out in other equine sporting venues -- including non-breed specific rodeo competitions like barrel racing and reining, polo matches and equestrian events leading up to the 2014 Olympics, according to backers of the technology." 

I don't believe for a minute that the anti-cloning faction is moved by ethical qualms about this disruptive technology. They are worried about losing their income from stud fees.

Also, please check out my previous posts:

Breeding Better Bucking Bulls

Bodies Built for Olympic Gold

The Criminal Mind of Adrian Raine

Adrian Raine

Neurocriminology is a fraught subject, as exemplified in this piece by Adrian Raine. On the one hand, proponents contend that criminal culpability is limited by neurological deficits that reduce one's ability to inhibit impulses. On the other hand, they don't want to use those findings to preventatively incarcerate people who exhibit those deficits. They present strong (really, really strong) evidence that criminal behavior is significantly influenced by genetics but they freak out at the suggestion that perhaps society should limit the breeding opportunities of psychopaths. (Actually that's exactly what long-term incarceration does.)

Some excerpts:

The field of neurocriminology—using neuroscience to understand and prevent crime—is revolutionizing our understanding of what drives "bad" behavior. More than 100 studies of twins and adopted children have confirmed that about half of the variance in aggressive and antisocial behavior can be attributed to genetics. Other research has begun to pinpoint which specific genes promote such behavior.

...

In a landmark 1984 study, my colleague Sarnoff Mednick found that children in Denmark who had been adopted from parents with a criminal record were more likely to become criminals in adulthood than were other adopted kids. The more offenses the biological parents had, the more likely it was that their offspring would be convicted of a crime. For biological parents who had no offenses, 13% of their sons had been convicted; for biological parents with three or more offenses, 25% of their sons had been convicted.

...

Take the case of Donta Page, who in 1999 robbed a young woman in Denver named Peyton Tuthill, then raped her, slit her throat and killed her by plunging a kitchen knife into her chest. Mr. Page was found guilty of first-degree murder and was a prime candidate for the death penalty.

Working as an expert witness for Mr. Page's defense counsel, I brought him to a lab to assess his brain functioning. Scans revealed a distinct lack of activation in the ventral prefrontal cortex—the brain region that helps to regulate our emotions and control our impulses.

In testifying, I argued for a deep-rooted biosocial explanation for Mr. Page's violence. As his files documented, as a child he suffered from poor nutrition, severe parental neglect, sustained physical and sexual abuse, early head injuries, learning disabilities, poor cognitive functioning and lead exposure. He also had a family history of mental illness. By the age of 18, Mr. Page had been referred for psychological treatment 19 times, but he had never once received treatment. A three-judge panel ultimately decided not to have him executed, accepting our argument that a mix of biological and social factors mitigated Mr. Page's responsibility.

Mr. Page escaped the death penalty partly on the basis of brain pathology—a welcome result for those who believe that risk factors should partially exculpate socially disadvantaged offenders. But the neurocriminologist's sword is double-edged. Neurocriminology also might have told us that Mr. Page should never have been on the street in the first place. At the time he committed the murder, he had been out of prison for only four months. Sentenced to 20 years for robbery, he was released after serving just four years.

...

Randomized, controlled trials have clearly documented the efficacy of a host of medications—including stimulants, antipsychotics, antidepressants and mood stabilizers—in treating aggression in children and adolescents. Parents are understandably reluctant to have their children medicated for bad behavior, but when all else fails, treating children to stabilize their uncontrollable aggressive acts and to make them more amenable to psychological interventions is an attractive option.

Treatment doesn't have to be invasive. Randomized, controlled trials in England and the Netherlands have shown that a simple fix—omega-3 supplements in the diets of young offenders—reduces serious offending by about 35%. Studies have also found that early environmental enrichment—including better nutrition, physical exercise and cognitive stimulation—enhances later brain functioning in children and reduces adult crime.

...

There is no question that neurocriminology puts us on difficult terrain, and some wish it didn't exist at all. How do we know that the bad old days of eugenics are truly over? Isn't research on the anatomy of violence a step toward a world where our fundamental human rights are lost?

End excerpts.


The idea that you can "treat" aggression in children and adolescents with pharmaceuticals is not exactly uncontroversial. Some of the most commonly prescribed drugs for aggression in children (e.g., Seroquel) don't seem to be effective. Part of the reason for this is that even the most violent children are violent only rarely, so if you use actual acts of violence as your dependent variable you will run into the same problems as any study of low base rate events. Many of the drugs mentioned by Raine have powerful sedating effects, so that might slow down some violent thugs. So did lobotomies. And in any case, you are not "treating" anything by sedating a violent kid; you are just managing his behaviors.

That omega-3/fish oil study seems pretty intriguing. (More like snake oil, actually -- beware of wondrous findings, especially if they are consistent with your existing beliefs or deepest wishes.) Here's a supplement study that reports a 35% reduction in offending by inmates -- this must be the study to which he is referring in the article.

Finally, it seems pretty clear that "the bad old days of eugenics" are far from over. In the U.S., up to 93% of prenatal diagnoses of Down's Syndrome result in elective termination of the pregnancy (abortion). The American upper middle class can easily employ sex selection (combined with artificial insemination) to get that baby girl they always wanted. As noted above, long-term incarceration of criminals probably has a secondary effect of limiting their potential breeding opportunities. As IVF and preimplantation genetic screening become more commonplace, how do you think potential parents will respond when asked to choose between probable Hi IQ and probable Lo IQ blastocysts (or between those with probable Hi or Lo Callous/Unemotional traits)?

Breeding Better Bucking Bulls

From the Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2013:

"[I]n the struggle between cowboy and bull, the cowboy suddenly doesn't stand much of a chance.

 

The past decade or so has seen a historic shift in the balance of power in the bull-riding industry. The best riders on the pro circuit used to hang on long enough to complete the requisite eight-second ride 85% of the time. Today's top cowboy on the elite Professional Bull Riders tour, Shane Proctor, has a career success rate of just 39%.

 

The top bull today, a 1,750-pound, high-kicking, whirling Dervish named Bushwacker, has thrown 40 cowboys in a row. No man has stayed on him for eight seconds since 2009.

 

"We're not breeding the cowboys quite as good as we're breeding the bulls," says Steve Ravenscroft, a stockman in Hyannis, Neb., whose bulls—named Doctor Spoon and Alabama Jig—handily dispatched their riders at a competition in Stephenville last month.

 

Back in the day, rodeo organizers would take whatever Ferdinand was grazing in the pasture and put a cowboy on top. Now bucking bulls are treated like chunky racehorses, with their breeders driven by big prize money that used to be reserved only for riders.

 

Bulls have personal trainers, a bloodline registry, in vitro fertilization, life insurance and an NFL-style draft. Rich urbanites board bulls with specialty ranchers and watch them compete on weekends. Champion bulls are paired with cows that have produced great buckers in the past. Some breeders have even cloned their best animals; there are four clones of a bull named Panhandle Slim on the circuit today. [!!!!]

 

...

 

 

Better bulls, of course, mean worse injuries for the cowboys—who usually live hand-to-mouth and earn only when they win.

 

Mr. Proctor's $1 million in winnings over nine years have cost him a broken jaw, a shattered left arm, a broken foot, broken legs and several broken ribs.

 

His brother-in law, No. 4 rider J.B. Mauney, a 26-year-old from Mooresville, N.C., has earned $3 million in prize money over his eight-year professional career. He has also suffered a broken leg, a collapsed lung and a lacerated liver.

 

Before riding a bull named Bring It's Pride at Stephenville, Cayd Kluesner, a 22-year-old minor-leaguer from Salmon, Idaho, took out a well-thumbed "The Way for Cowboys Bible" and read Philippians 4:13 to himself, mouthing the words: "I can do everything through him who gives me strength."

 

A few hours later, Bring It's Pride bucked off Mr. Kluesner shy of the eight seconds. The cowboy landed safely on his feet. Apparently dissatisfied, the bull pivoted, lifted Mr. Kluesner on its horns and threw him into the air. This time, Mr. Kluesner crashed onto his back in the dirt.

 

At the Stephenville event, cowboys stayed on for the full eight seconds in just 28 of 190 rides.

 

Old-timers say the best bulls of the present are no better than the great bulls of the past. It's just that there aren't any duds in competition anymore; every bull is bred to buck savagely.

 

Most aficionados, however, believe Bushwacker is something special, perhaps the greatest ever. He remains calm as the rider climbs on in the chute, saving his energy for the moment the gate swings open. Then he might spring four feet in the air, changing direction in flight like a bovine Michael Jordan.

 

"He's never done the same thing twice," says Mr. Mauney, who has been thrown by Bushwacker eight times.

 

Austin Meier, 26, of Kinta, Okla., won $52,000 and the Iron Cowboy title last month by staying on Bushwacker for a mere 2.67 seconds. (His career riding record: 49%. His career medical record: Two ACL operations, plates and screws in both sides of his jaw, elbow surgery, ankle surgery, wrist surgery and a sinus crushed by a horn.)

 

Bushwacker's owner, Julio Moreno, of Oakdale, Calif., has a freezer full of the bull's semen that sells for at least $3,000 per unit. Mr. Moreno is holding on to most of his stash in the belief it will grow only more valuable as his champ's successes mount. He says he turned down an offer for $750,000 for the bull.

 

...

 

Many hobbyists have neither the expertise nor facilities to prepare a bull for competition. So they hire a personal trainer, such as Gilbert Carrillo, owner of 4C's Bucking Bulls & Training Facility in Stephenville.

 

Mr. Carrillo, 41, provides trainee bulls a muscle-building diet and exercise regimen. He runs them endlessly through chutes, blaring loud music, until they are comfortable with the routine they will encounter in the arena.

 

Mr. Carrillo says he can teach spinning, but a bull either kicks or it doesn't. He uses Pavlovian techniques to reinforce bulls' innate skills. Mr. Carrillo straps a 24-pound box to its back and, when the animal bucks well, rewards him by using a remote control that makes the box fall off."

 

[End Excerpt]

 

 

 

By the way, that's actually a Skinnerian technique (negative reinforcement), not "Pavlovian".

 

Once upon a time, some stockmen might have had moral or ethical qualms about cloning a champion bull. But given sufficient incentives, those qualms quickly fade into the background. Stay tuned for cloned horses in competition. By the way, the rheseus monkey is among the many species that have been cloned. When people assert that "we will never see human cloning," they are expressing a wish, not making a science-based statement about the possibility of artificial human cloning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bodies Built for Olympic Gold

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal during the 2012 Summer Olympics. The basic implication is that if Success in Sport = Genetics x Environment, and if all top international athletes have roughly equal environments (e.g., training facilities, coaching expertise, nutrition programs, time available to train, reinforcement -- which is called "commitment" in the article), then the only part of the equation left that can explain variance in outcome (i.e., why some athletes medal and others don't) is genetics.



Excerpts:

"Of all the superlatives connected with the London Olympics, none may be more remarkable than this: The games will feature the most extraordinary collection of physical specimens in the history of international sports.

Whether it's the chest-high legs that carry sprinter Usain Bolt down the track, or the raw power that 17-year-old swimmer Missy Franklin can generate from her 6-foot-1 frame and 76-inch wing span, the Olympic stars this summer have bodies custom-built for the sports they compete in. To borrow Lady Gaga's phrase, many of these medalists were simply "born this way."

...

With high-level training so ubiquitous, God-given talent and physical advantages become the great differentiators. Consider Ms. Franklin, the precocious swimmer from Colorado who could win as many as seven medals in London, several of them gold, during the summer before her senior year in high school.

Todd Schmitz, her coach since she was 7 years old, said she didn't have naturally beautiful strokes as a beginner, but her size always gave her a distinct advantage.

"She's just always been so strong," said Missy's mother, D.A. Franklin, citing the stamina this gives her. "She's stronger racing at 200 meters than she is at 100 meters. She's better in the long pool than she is in the short pools."

Ms. Franklin doesn't actually train all that hard, swimming 5,000 to 6,000 yards a day, or about half as far as Michael Phelps does. She usually takes off two days a week; most top swimmers take just one. But Ms. Franklin is a near-lock to win gold in the 200-meter backstroke and may win the 100 meters because she swims differently than everyone else.

Most backstrokers crank their hands through the water 6 to 8 inches below the surface. But Ms. Franklin catches the water just 2 inches below the surface, according to Mr. Schmitz.

 

Ms. Franklin isn't rotating her shoulders irregularly. Rather, her longer arms and legs exert so much downward pressure that she is actually higher in the water than the competition. She skitters across the surface like a hydroplane, while her competitors power through it.

 

...

The ultimate Olympic outlier may be Usain Bolt, the 6-foot-5-inch sprinter who excels in a discipline where height was long thought to be a disadvantage. The reason: a quick start is essential, and unfolding a bigger frame can waste precious time in a race decided by hundredths of a second.

...

Mr. Bolt...has shown how the physics of the race actually favor him. At its core, running speed is about finding the most mechanically efficient balance between stride length and stride frequency. Sprinters cover ground by falling forward with every step. The body rises and falls in an arc. The longer the legs, the bigger the arc. But steps too far out in front of the center of mass throw off balance and slow a runner.

Mr. Bolt's waist is some 4 feet off the ground—his legs are proportionally longer than his torso. This allows him to create the race's biggest, most efficient arc. He takes a little more than 40 steps to complete the race. His competition takes about 45.

...

This is very bad news for Mr. Bolt's competition. If he starts cleanly and runs his normal race, he essentially can't lose."

End Excerpts

The on-line article also has some interesting interactive graphics that are worth checking out. I particularly like the Missy Franklin and Usain Bolt features.

 

It is interesting to contrast the above story about human athletes with this article about Man O'War, the greatest racehorse of the first half of the 20th century. An excerpt:

"Not only did Man o' War perform like a superstar on the track, the chestnut-colored horse (though he was nicknamed "Big Red") looked like one. At 3, he was a strapping 16.2 hands (about 5-foot-6) and weighed about 1,125 pounds with a 72-inch girth. His appetite also was huge, as he ate 12 quarts of oats every day, or about three quarts more than the average racehorse. He ran in big bounds as well, with his stride measuring an incredible 25 to 28 feet.  Bred by August Belmont II, son of the founder of Belmont Park and for whom the Belmont Stakes was named, the future champion was foaled on March 29, 1917 at Nursery Stud near Lexington, Ky. His sire was Fair Play and his dam was Mahubah, the daughter of Rock Sand, the 1903 winner of Britain's version of the Triple Crown (the 2,000 Guineas, the Epsom Derby and the St. Leger). He was 15 generations removed from the Godolphin Arabia, one of three Arab and Barb stallions considered to be the founders of the thoroughbred line."

How long until we start hearing about the "breeding lines" of elite human athletes?

The Annual Edge Question

Every year The Edge poses a single question to a variety of intellectually influential folks. The question for 2013 was, "What should we be worried about?" Many of the responses are thought-provoking, and it is time well spent (or at least better spent than many alternatives) to browse the responses to this question and the questions from prior years.

The lead-off response from evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller is closest to my own concerns, as anyone who has taken a course with me in the past few years would know. His response is Chinese Eugenics, and he makes his points well. An excerpt:

"China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.
...
But then Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao's death. Deng had long understood that China would succeed only if the Communist Party shifted its attention from economic policy to population policy. He liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy —partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children "later, longer, fewer, better"—at a later age, with a longer interval between birth, resulting in fewer children of higher quality. With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects. Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness.
 
...
Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.
 
The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."

[End excerpt]

For a particularly effective (and disarming) explanation of the BGI project, see the video of the talk at Google given by Steve Hsu in 2011. Dr. Hsu's blog, Information Processing, is also worth checking out regularly, even when he is writing about theoretical physics and theoretical physicists. For example, the blog is where I first saw this video of Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb) reminiscing about fellow physicist John von Neumann. Teller's observation that "for most people, thinking is painful" can be quite useful in understanding the behaviors of those around us. Teller notes that some people are "addicted" to thinking and some find it a "necessity." However, every once in a while there comes along someone for whom thinking is a pleasure, even the greatest pleasure.