Tag Archives: Notes

Gladwell on genetic advantages

Nice Gladwell's piece on the New Yorker on genetic advantages in sports.

"In “The Sports Gene,” there are countless tales like this, examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes."

This is pretty clear, as I a said before anyone with half a brain can notice differences. People with agenda say everyone has the same potential. We do not. Physiological and morpholological differences are not easy to notice at the very top level, just because they are all exceptional, they are all outliers. But morpholological and physiological differences between top competitors and the lower-tier competitors/amateurs/hobbyists are clearly visible. You simply do not have the body structure/size to be a world-class javelin thrower, sprinter, shot-putter(now, do you think you have the same genetic potential?), long-distance runner, etc. There are non-responders to athletic stimuli and super-responders. There are people getting injured every second step and people with super tolerance to high volume workouts/competitions.

It is the same for a range of other "skills", from solving mathematical problems, to be at ease with learning new languages (surprisingly I have never seen studies testing whether the ability to learn programming languages is correlated with the ability to learn foreign languages, do they exist?), to just be good-looking, or "naturally" in decent shape.

For guys who jumped on the strange "we have all pretty much equal potential" bandwagon, just Open you Eyes (I,II).

Read the whole thing.