A reminder/follow up to Monday’s post.
This evening at 6 p.m. EDT I’ll be talking with author and Sports Illustrated Senior Writer David Epstein about his new book The Sports Gene. You can listen to the show, Virtually Speaking Science live and later here — and you can catch up on my episodes or those of other hosts (Alan Boyle, Jennifer Ouellette, PZ Myers) either by searching my name or Virtually Speaking Science at either Blog Talk Radio or on iTunes.
The show also goes up virtually live in Second Life (yes — it still exists!) at the Exploratorium’s in-world space. If you’re into SL, or merely avatar-curious, come on down. It’s weirdly fun doing this in front of a “live” studio audience.
Now to the substance. Let me get right out in front of it. A book that looks at genes and human possibility — both physical and mental/emotional — is navigating a mine field of sloppy science, bad intentions, and terrible history. David has managed to write a book that is smart, scientifically literate, clear and subtle.
Here’s the passage with which David begins his Epilogue:
Eero Mäntyranta’s life story is a paragon of a 10,000 hours tale.
Mäntyranta grew up in poverty and had to ski across a frozen lake to get to and from school each day. As a young adult, he took up serious skiing as a way to improve his life station — to land a job as a border patrolman and escape the danger and drudgery of forest work. The faintest taste of success was all Mäntyranta needed to embark on the furious training that forged one of the greatest Olympic athletes of a generation. Who would deny his hard work or the lonely suffering he endured on algid winter nights? Swap skis for feet and the Arctic forest for the Rift Valley and Mäntyranta’s tale would fit snugly into the narrative template of a Kenyan marathoner.
If not for a batch of curious scientists who were familiar with Mäntyranta’s exploits and invited him to their lab twenty years after his retirement, his story might have remained a pure triumph of nurture. But illuminated by the light of genetics, Mäntyranta’s life tale looks like something entirely different: 100 percent nature and 100 percent nurture….
And, a little later in this concluding essay:
In all likelihood, we over ascribe our skills and traits to either innate talent or training, depending on what fits our personal narratives.
One of the pleasures of the book is a proper debunking of the Gladwell version of the 10,000 hours story, and we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about genes, about the implications of genetic and human variation, on what use those of us who aren’t elite athletes can make of new scientific investigations into things like the genetics of brain trauma or injury, and much more. I found this book deeply intriguing, a page turner, for all the complexity of some of the technical matters under scrutiny. Most of all, for all its presentation as a sports book, or sports science book, I found it best read as an idiosyncratic doorway into an increasingly rich understanding of human possibility. I didn’t need genetics to tell me that I never could have been an Olympic (or high school) sprinter.
It gives me a kind of joy to realize as a fifty something slowest-jogger-on-the-river that there is a growing body of knowledge that can help me think systematically about the best way to train the body I’ve got. Cool stuff.
Last — a couple of factoids that turned up in my pre-interview with David that are too good not to share ahead of time.
For one, just for those who think we’re in post-racial America, David pointed out to me that the alleged inverse relationship between athletic prowess and intellectual skill only started to getting talked about in the US as African-American athletes gained access to previously all white or white dominated sports. For another: in the 30s, basketball, historically an urban sport, had a disproportionate number of Jews at high levels of the game. So folks talked about a Jewish basketball gene, and you got some predictable crap about canny Jews knowing how to steal the ball and such like.
Oy — but fodder for some fascinating radio.
Tune in this afternoon or later as you get the chance.
Image (per commenter Shakezula’s suggestion): Nicholas Colombel, Atalante and Hippomenes, 1680.
Switched for Egon Schiele’s Running Girl, 1915 For the reason for the switch, see comment 8 below.
Tyro
I am close to 100% sure we would have never have heard of Eero Mäntyranta if his parents had emigrated to Florida in the 1930s and made their living as orange farmers.
Anoniminous
Trying to reconcile this:
with:
and failing.
Tom Levenson
@Anoniminous: You may be familiar with the concept of a rhetorical device?
Southern Beale
So, today we welcomed TN Rep. Chuck Fleischmann into the American Morans club.
The fact that after ALL of this time Republicans refuse to use spell-check just proves how anti-science they are.
Punchy
About gay marriage…..
That damn number again.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Tom Levenson:
Is that the doohickey that let’s me turn my weed eater into a tree trimmer?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Anoniminous: I bounced off that, too.
My PT, also a track coach, says that he can train anyone to be better, but agrees that genetics plays a role in which sport is the best fit for an individual.
Tehanu
Not crazy about the Atalanta picture, since the whole story is about how girls are easily distracted. I don’t think Alyson Felix stops in the middle of a 200m run to pick up an “Ooh! Shiny!” object. With all due respect to you and Shakezula, even something by Leroy Neiman would have been a better choice.
Face
@Tehanu: You’ve clearly never taken a woman shoe-shopping.
Dead Ernest
Tom, a link, or directions to the Internet radio broadcast please?
Thx.
Gin & Tonic
That 10,000 number keeps coming up like the 27%; I wonder about its origin. Years ago I played the board game called Go semi-seriously – it has a long history, and I recall reading a centuries-old (or at least century-old) argument that one needed to play 10,000 games to be able to achieve the lowest (1-dan) “professional” ranking.
Marc
Don’t know where to put this, but apparently the Indiana blogger Doghouse Riley (aka Doug Case) has passed away:
http://www.masson.us/blog/r-i-p-doghouse-riley/
He was a gifted writer. Damn.
Villago Delenda Est
I’m pretty sure the intelligence/sports talent relationship has a great deal to do with stereotyping of dumb jocks as dumb jocks. It’s a stupid stereotype, but there are enough really stupid jocks to make it plausible. I give you all these football players who have tons of money to hire a driver but insist on driving drunk and killing their passengers
WereBear
How can their present stance be “NOT conservative enough”? Are they holding out for burning at the stake?
catclub
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I remember hearing that the Australian rowing teams just looked for men who would grow to be about 6’4″ and 200 pounds
(or the metric equivalents thereof).
Then they would teach them to row.
raven
Ever see Boys Of 2nd Street
catclub
@Gin & Tonic: Doesn’t Go come from the place where they had that saying “A journey of 10,000 Li begins with but a single step.”?
So 10,000 may just be a big number.
80-20 rules are ubiquitous.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear:
Yes.
Well, that or pink triangles and Vernichtungslagern for fags.
SATSQ.
NotMax
Not classical art, but would have suggested something from the Futurist school to complement the topic.
For example, this painting by Giacomo Balla, which includes imagery evocative of both determined movement and the double helix.
JCT
Looks like a great read, Tom.
Meanwhile our popular press continues to flail when it comes to fatal heart disease in young athletes (a significant proportion is genetic) — the chances that Christian Benitez died of “heart failure” are exceedingly small and pretty misleading. Must have received 15 emails today about the poor young man.
shell
I’m getting concerned. It’s almost a whole day without Cole posting something about Steve.
raven
Better trailer for The Boys.
Just Some Fuckhead
@shell: John is detoxing from the lavender oil. I think you’ll find a different person when he returns.
Tom Levenson
@JCT: We’ll be talking about that in the show. I first heard about David, btw, when he talked to a relative of mine who is expert on the genetic issues in cardiac myopathies…so we will definitely be going there. It’s a big thing for David — his chapter on these issues begins with an account of his own high school training partner dropping dead on the track.
@Tehanu: You know, you’re right. I’ll change out the image.
Chris
@WereBear:
I think the 27% have no idea what their party’s stance is, but are bombarded daily with messages from Fox News and all the others telling them that the Republican establishment is overrun with liberal RINOs sabotaging the Glorious Revolution, so they figure the stance MUST be too liberal, whatever it is.
schrodinger's cat
Moment of Zen : The Itteh Bitteh Kitteh Committeh Naptime
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@catclub: I have some of the physical markers to play point guard, especially the wide field of vision — I used to win bets in high school counting fingers held up in my peripheral vision — but we were still playing half court when I was in school. I sucked at half court.
I can’t sprint worth a damn.
But I absolutely love strength training. I would have been a good match for anything that would give me an excuse spend a lot of quality time with weights.
That’s why I have a PT. He keeps me from overdoing and hurting myself.
JCT
@Tom Levenson: Small world – genetic cardiomyopathies are my field -I’ll bet money I know your relative…
It’s really a shame and a public disservice when they publish misleading stories like this. All in the rush to have the “answer” and they lose a real opportunity to inform.
David is the polar opposite – I heard him speak at an HCMA meeting once, he has saved lives with his stories. I just wish there were more like him.
raven
@JCT: It’s what killed the Pistol isn’t it?
raven
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Women’s half court like in Iowa?
Tom Levenson
@JCT: Probably. My sis and bro in law are Christine and Jon Seidman. Any errors I make about genetics are mine alone, btw.
Anoniminous
@Tom Levenson:
And you may be familiar with the poem The Theory That Jack Built?
JCT
@Tom Levenson: Kricket and Jon, the founders of the field of genetic cardiomyopathies. Dear friends and colleagues. Their 1990 Cell paper changed my career plans, no joke. Kricket, by the way, is the role model for an entire generation of female physician scientists in cardiology.
I’m just grinning away here -what a great coincidence – and I haven’t seen any serious errors on your part yet!
I’ll bet Kricket is as annoyed over that CNN article as I am…
JCT
@raven: Pistol Pete actually had a rare congenital abnormality, not genetic per se. I’m pretty sure he was missing one of his coronaries (his left if I remember correctly) and that can put you at significant risk of sudden cardiac death. Back then the only way to pick that up would have been a coronary angiogram and since he didn’t have precedent symptoms he never had one. Sad case.
raven
@JCT: Ah, thanks. Maybe Jim Fixx was closer.
Donald
I couldn’t wait to listen to the Gladwell takedown, so I googled and found this–
Shermer’s explanation of Epstein’s point
More or less what I expected. Most of us who have been semi-serious about any sort of athletic goal eventually learn that Olympic level performance is far beyond our reach. Not that I personally had any illusions about that.
raven
I’ve always been interested in the The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei .
Jockey Full of Malbec
FWIW, one of the markers that 23andme tests for is a “sprinter’s gene” that apparently indicates that one is more likely to have a metabolism tuned for short bursts of high energy than the ‘marathoner’ type.
The sample sizes of the studies cited as justification for this are quite small, though (in the tens).
JCT
@raven: In a way – Fixx had an apparent strong family predisposition to severe coronary artery disease. His death was shocking – I still remember discussing it with my brother in law, he revered Fixx.
raven
@JCT: Yea,I my dad was a fanatic runner way back before the boom. He ran in galoshes and Chuck Taylor’s in the early 60’s. Heart eventually got him but he was in his 80’s and had a hell of a “run”. He too was devastated when Fixx died.
Mandalay
@Tom Levenson:
OT…I had never heard of him, but Egon Schiele is one helluva painter. I’ve just spent an hour looking at his stuff and I’m in awe. Just incredible.
Anne Laurie
@Gin & Tonic: Off-topic — except that it’s all about the interaction between “native talent” and “years of hard work” — have you ever seen the Hikaru no Go anime? An ordinary Japanese middle-schooler finds part of his brain taken over by a long-deceased fanatic Go player/ teacher, and the two of them spend years working out a relationship that rewards both partners. I’m so math-averse I could barely keep the highlighted game moves in my head for the length of a 23-minute episode, but it series still kept me on the edge of my seat!
Gin & Tonic
@Anne Laurie: I have not. Not big on anime, but maybe I’ll give a look-see. In a more literary vein, Kawabata’s novel The Master of Go is excellent – it helps if you understand the game, but it isn’t essential. Has the “years of practice” element, but also the fraught relationship between master and student, as the ability of the latter begins to outstrip the declining faculties of the former – colored by the Japanese hierarchical mindset.
Mandalay
@Donald:
Yes, no surprise there, and no surprise that Gladwell’s 10,000 hours claim doesn’t bear close scrutiny (though I’m persuaded that it is relevant in fields such as chess and music).
But what intrigues me is why Jamaica’s sprinters are so incredible. Usain Bolt is almost apologetic about how poor he is at training. How is it that the USA, with dollars and population both massively in its favor, cannot come close to matching Jamaican performances? Bear in mind that the population of Jamaica is roughly that of Chicago.
Neither nature nor nurture seem to explain it.
Tom Levenson
@Mandalay: Hence David’s book, which features Ch. 10 “The Warrior-Slave Theory of Jamaican Sprinting, and Ch. 11, which continues the discussion in a section titled “Malaria and Muscle Fibers.”
As they say…it’s complicated.
Re chess and music…David also writes about 10,000 hours as it applies to chess. Again, the answer is it’s complicated. David cites a study of competitive chess players that showed (a) it took about 11,000 hours of study to attain master status, but that the average masks a range of results from 3,000 hours to 23,000.
Tom Levenson
@Mandalay: Schiele’s a beast. I don’t use his stuff that much because a lot of it is still copyright-protected, but I do love it. Lots of just fabulous early-mid 20th c. German art.
NickT
The 10,000 hours “rule” goes back to a 1993 study of 20 top violinists by the psychologist Anders Ericsson:
“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” in Psychological Review
Villago Delenda Est
@Tom Levenson:
Pretty much the same way that when Bill Gates walks into a room of 100 other people, the average income for the room spikes.
NickT
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf
This is a pdf of the Ericsson paper, which is fairly dense, so be warned.
Mnemosyne
@Mandalay:
It’s probably semi-relevant, but I doubt that 10,000 hours of practice can turn someone into a gifted musician. I’m sure they will be technically proficient and able to play a piece of music you set in front of them, but they probably won’t be an artist solely on the basis of putting in the hours.
IMO, the people willing to put in the 10,000 hours of practice are the ones who enjoy it and find it interesting and challenging, so it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem — are the people who become great artists the ones who practiced the most, or do great artists practice the most because they enjoy their art?
NickT
@Mnemosyne:
That actually fits very well with the original paper, not Gladwell’s lazy popularization of it. There’s a distinction between different qualities of practice – you can’t just “tote that barge” for 10000 hours and *presto* genius! It’s unfortunate that people who should know better have just taken the 10,000 hours part and junked the caveats that were in the original piece.
mclaren
Unmentioned in any of this, the breakdown of links twixt alleged genetic predisposition when we move outside athletics.
It would prove amusing indeed to see some gene studies that purported to find a “currency trading gene” or an “elite art broker gene.”
Jay C
@Tom Levenson:
Copyright-protected by who? Egon Schiele died in 1918: even by the US’ disgracefully near-eternal standards, most of hnis stuff, one would think, would be in the public domain by now….
And yeah, Egon rocks!
NickT
@Jay C:
http://www.egon-schiele.net/the-complete-works.html
Enjoy.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
Not really — people often come from “musical families” or have multiple writers or artists in a single family.
It breaks down when you leave the area of tangible skills, like drawing or music.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@raven: Yup. I clearly remember when women’s basketball switched to full court. My mother was livid.
As far as I ever knew, all women’s basketball was half court until the mid ’70’s. My mother played half court in school in the ’30’s and ’40’s.
Jay C
@NickT:
Fascinating site, thanks. But it still doesn’t answer the question raised by Tom Levenson: ‘s comment @ #46: I know that sometimes museums will “copyright” their images, but, unless I’m mistaken, the underlying image (i.e. the artist’s original depiction) should be free for reproduction after the original time-limit runs out.
Mandalay
@Villago Delenda Est:
On a semi-related note, Bill Gates once defended having a lot of relatively inexperienced programmers at Microsoft. His argument (and I’m paraphrasing) was that if they could deliver without much experience that was fine, and if they couldn’t deliver now they never would.
Though it gets much less scrutiny than sport, I think the relative abilities of software developers are similar to those of athletes. Really good programmers aren’t 30% better than good programmers…they’re 3000% better, and they will do things that merely “good” programmers will never do, no matter how long they work.
Of course metrics are readily available in sport to show the relative performance levels of different athletes. It’s harder to do that with software developers, but I’m convinced the parallel exists.
Gin & Tonic
@Mandalay: But nobody is 3000% better in sport. The difference between making the Olympic team and not, is often less than 5%. The difference between elite and average *may* be 100%. An elite men’s marathoner completes the distance in a bit over two hours. Lots and lots of serious recreational runners complete the distance in a bit over four hours. I’ve ridden a bike 100 miles in 5 hours, and I’m nobody. A doped-to-the-gills Lance Armstrong *might* do it under 3.5, not under 3.
eyelessgame
I ascribe my skills and traits to luck. There was some hard work. There may have been some good genes. But mostly there was opportunity.
rp
I don’t think gladwell ever claimed that 10,000 hours of practice would turn an average person into an olympic athlete.
raven
I love David’s analysis of the NFL combine!
Mandalay
@Gin & Tonic:
My wording was a bit poor, and the numbers I picked were arbitrary, but I stick to my guns. A 100m sprinter who repeatedly runs under 9.9 secs is not just 1% better than a sprinter with a personal best of 10.0. They are in different leagues.
Less measurably, in soccer, Lionel Messi is not merely “better” than his Barcelona team mates, all of whom are world class, and all of whom also play for their country. He is far, far better. You would have trouble finding many with an informed opinion arguing that Messi is not the best player on that team. Most believe he is the best player in the world. The debate has moved on to whether he is the greatest soccer player ever. So we can mull over whether Messi is “300%” better or “3000%” better, but you will have trouble persuading most informed fans that he is just (say) 5% better than his team mates.
raven
@Mandalay: Are you listening to this?
NickT
@Mandalay:
Those fans would be idiots then. 5% is a huge competitive edge in sport.
Mandalay
@rp:
You are correct. He didn’t, and some folks distort what Gladwell claimed. I don’t really with agree with him too much myself, but it does seem that in certain fields (e.g. chess? piano?) amazing talent alone is insufficient. Thousands of hours of practice and study are also pre-requisites to make it.
Of course Mozart was composing stuff when he was five, but that was only because he had failed to read Gladwell’s book.
raven
@Mandalay: They are explaining on the show that he used 10 world class violin payers.
NickT
@raven:
Plus a team of rivals, five ghostwriters of classical music and a crowd-sourced partridge in a pear tree.
Mandalay
@raven: No, and I have to go on my run now to maintain my mediocre performance level.
I will listen later.
Schoenberg Fan
Didn’t Schiele supposedly have a sex doll made to look like Alma Mahler? The painting looks more like a doll lying on the floor than a living, running human to me.
raven
@Mandalay: It’s good.
mclaren
@Anoniminous:
That’s because half your problem is trying to think through what the author says, and the other 90% of your problem is writing comments like this.
JCT
@raven: The baseball discussion is pretty awesome – looking forward to sharing it with my boy. He obsesses over his hitting.
Gin & Tonic
@Mandalay: Nick T is right. Just one example: the 60m dash at last year’s world indoor championships – in the finals, first place went to Justin Gatlin of the US, whom most people have heard of, at 6.46. Last place went to Aziz Ouhadi of Morocco, shall we say less well-known, at 6.72, almost a 5% difference.
raven
@JCT: Check out the idiot comments on the youtube of Jennie and the baseball players!
raven
@JCT: never mind
raven
Wow, a brain injury recovery gene!
raven
Great show! Thanks.
Tom Levenson
Thanks to everyone for listening, commenting.
Over and out.
raven
@Tom Levenson: Just out, not such thing as “”over and out”. :)
Gin & Tonic
@raven: Or 73.
Mandalay
@Gin & Tonic:
As I posted earlier, that is exactly the sort of comparison that is utterly meaningless. Do you really think a runner who completes 100m in 11 seconds is only 10% worse than a runner who completes it in 10 seconds? The gulf between the two is massive. There aren’t many sprinters in the world who can do it in 10 seconds, but (hundreds of?) thousands can do it in 11 seconds.
And by that argument, Usain Bolt is only a few thousandths of a % better than his peers, which is also absurd…he is a class above them. Just applying an absolute time comparison to establish relative merit is preposterous.
And that’s just for the simple case of sprinting. What criteria do you use for basketball players, boxers, soccer players, etc?
Ecks
@Mandalay:
Actually Gladwell mentions this in his book, and makes the claim that sure Mozart was writing good stuff very young, but he didn’t write any of his GREAT stuff until he had his 10,000 hours.
And no, Gladwell doesn’t try to claim 10k hours is a sufficient condition to make anyone into anything. His claim was only that it is a necessary condition. You need a lot of talent and drive and such to start with, and THEN you need your 10k hours to refine it.
Maybe that is wrong, and there’s actually a lot more variation, and some people do it in 3k hours, some in more. Fine, the theory improves with refinement. But trying to make Gladwell into a poster boy for “effort only” is a lazy attempt to turn him into a straw man. Which is ironic, really – intellectually lazily accusing someone of intellectual laziness.
mclaren
@rp:
Gladwell claimed that it takes on average 10,000 hours of practice to turn a person into a high-level expert performer. Pretty sure Gladwell specifically exempted athletic skills.
There are very big problems with Gladwell’s claim. For example, advanced math. Above a certain level in mathematics, nobody can manage unless you’re born with a certain mental quirk that lets you grasp that kind of stuff.
Proof?
Nobel physics laureate Hideki Yukawa was reported to have said: “There are two kinds of math papers: one where you get lost after the first page, and the other kind where you get lost after the first line.”
A Nobel laureate in physics.
Tyro
@Ecks: Exactly. The 10,000 hours was necessary but insufficient. He specifically raised examples of those with huge amounts of genetic talent who never got to that point. Much of his book seemed to cover the merely “very talented/smart” whose circumstances allowed them to rise to the top.
There’s really something about the book that really bugs people. He isn’t saying that genes/inborn talent play no role. He’s saying both that genes/talent are common enough plenty of people have it who let it go unused and that the very rarefied successes in their field only got their because that talent was combined with very intense study and practice of their craft, which many times occurred due to fortuitous circumstances or special drive.
But for some reason saying, “the top achievers in their field were the ones who spent the most time working on their field” really pushes people’s buttons.
Wrye
@rp: No, he really didn’t. That so many people think he said something like this (Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail, off the top of my head) I think testifies to his not being clear enough. His argument was actually closer to the sentiment that *no one* can be a world class expert without the requisite amount of practice – so some people who had the natural genetics or ability and who could have been world class musicians or athletes never reached their potential simply because of what are essentially random or arbitrary factors – only a handful of people even get the chance for the 10,000 hours in the first place. He never claims anyone could have been the Beatles – simply that the Beatles would never have been the Beatles without their making the most of an opportunity no one else had.
rp
@Wrye: I think he was pretty clear. As Tyro noted, for whatever reason, he really seems to bug some people, and they feel the need to debunk him with strawmen.
Another example he cites is Bill Gates. He argues that Gates has an extraordinary mind and talent, and that he happened to be in a situation where he could exploit that talent.
rp
oops — deleted
Tehanu
@Tyro:
I’ve got a lot of actor friends and they will all tell you that talent is a very widespread commodity. There are a zillion talented, wonderful actors out there. But success requires much more than talent, including hard work of course, but also just plain sheer luck, being in the right place at the right time, getting the right part in the right play or film… Talent is a wonderful thing and it’s necessary, but not sufficient.