There are some rumblings over China’s supposed sport eugenics program. While It is possible that this was limited to Mao and basketball’s Yao Ming, it is also possible that China is still attempting to breed superstar athletes.
On the face of this, I say, “So what?” Can any government really see 20 years into the future (the time it takes to conceive, birth, and raise a future star — gymnastics excluded) and produce athletes with superior genetics, guaranteed to win gold after gold? Hmmm.
Would any government bureaucrat have predicted 21 years ago that a tall, relatively lanky runner could blister the 100-meter record? Not likely. Any sports minister worth his tax-salary would have bred midsized runners with strong, powerful legs.
Can any government agent predict the future of basketball 20 years from now? Of course not. Government cannot plan the future, whether in economics or sports.
My concern with any eugenics plan is the other end of the spectrum; the millions of humans that government ends up destroying in order to create its envisioned supreme man (consider Nazi Germany eugenics and the New Soviet Man in the USSR). This is certainly one race that we do not need to enter: the genetically-superior athletes race (similar to the sundry other races we entered, such as space race, etc.)
That vary large concern aside: If anyone thinks that China can plan and breed athletes for the 2028 Olympic Games, consider how well your local city planned its daily rush hour.
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Yao Ming is nowhere near the most popular basketball player in China.
The last time I wan in China, McDonalds was selling promotional NBA player glasses. I think there were a half dozen so players in the collection. Yao was not one of them.
The most popular players in China are Lebron James and Allen Iverson, by a huge margin. Michael Jordan is still very popular there. Even now he is still probprably third.
African Americans are largely the descendants of slaves. Slaves were selected by traders on the basis of physical strength and prowess as they were intended for manual labor. Furthermore, very large percentages of those transported died from the terrible conditions, meaning the survivors of the voyages were further ‘selected’ – they would have been the most physically robust of the captives.
So perhaps we could more plausibly argue that the US basketball team is a product of a particularly vicious form of eugenics.
African Americans are largely the descendants of slaves. Slaves were selected by traders on the basis of physical strength and prowess as they were intended for manual labor. Furthermore, very large percentages of those transported died from the terrible conditions, meaning the survivors of the voyages were further ‘selected’ – they would have been the most physically robust of the captives.
So perhaps we could more plausibly argue that the US basketball team is a product (albeit an unintended product) of a particularly vicious form of eugenics.
Dan,
Jimmy the Greek agreed with your assessment of African American athletes (and ended his career by voicing the opinion). Eugenics does not work on an individual basis, but it certainly works in aggregate over a long period of time.
Nevertheless, Sparta was probably the most dedicated experiment in eugenics and they failed in the end. As we can observe with the defects in farm animals and food crops that have been bred too far afield, genetic manipulation is a double edged sword.
I am not worried about eugenics creating superhumans that I cannot compete with. I do worry about governments with the power to perform eugenics experiments that I would find intolerable to live with.
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