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kimball_hansen's review against another edition
3.0
This book was decent - a little slow and boring at some points. But that's more because I'm doing boring, slow work at the moment.
Notes:
One of the reason why people jump higher from taking steps is because you're compressing the Achilles spring and letting it charge up then release.
Finally, I know why in the early 1900's there weren't a lot of woman's events as men's. It was because they thought that running long distance was hazardous to women's health.
Runningbacks and cornerbacks have gotten shorter over the years because it's harder to start and stop when you're tall.
The higher the temperature the longer the limbs will be for animals and people. Not sure why I wrote this note down because I can't think of the context.
I wonder if I have HCM - an enlarged heart. That means I'll just drop dead.
Competition can activate the fight or flight response when you don't feel pain.
Notes:
One of the reason why people jump higher from taking steps is because you're compressing the Achilles spring and letting it charge up then release.
Finally, I know why in the early 1900's there weren't a lot of woman's events as men's. It was because they thought that running long distance was hazardous to women's health.
Runningbacks and cornerbacks have gotten shorter over the years because it's harder to start and stop when you're tall.
The higher the temperature the longer the limbs will be for animals and people. Not sure why I wrote this note down because I can't think of the context.
I wonder if I have HCM - an enlarged heart. That means I'll just drop dead.
Competition can activate the fight or flight response when you don't feel pain.
bristlecone's review against another edition
2.0
I was very excited to read this book. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I was not looking for a book that profiled famous athletes. I was looking for a book that reviewed the scientific literature on athletic performance and the interconnection between nature and nurture. During the first chapter or two, I was very pleased with the author's attempts to address causal complexity --- how it is incredibly difficult to separate the impact of learned/trained and genetic factors on success (any kind of success, not just athletic). The early chapters address the 10,000 hour rule with a critical eye that has been lacking in other attempts to examine the interaction of training and genetics.
However, after the first couple of chapters, the author moves deeper and deeper into genetic analysis of athletic performance and as he does so, his interpretation of the scientific literature that he chooses to review and the conclusions he draws become increasingly simplistic, ignoring the complexity he discussed earlier. I was particularly bothered by several recurring problems: poor definition of athleticism, drawing conclusions based on ecological fallacy and neglecting the causal complexity that the author claims to have addressed, and ignoring research that does not fit with the author's desired conclusion.
First, the author is exploring the literature on elite athletic performance, using professional athletic success as the selection criteria. But this ignores the reality that actual athleticism may not be fully encompassed or represented in current sports for which one might be paid to perform. Indeed, it might not be fully encompassed in activities currently referred to as sports. At the very least, the author should have discussed the potential limitations of using professional athletic achievement as the criteria for identifying athleticism. For example, he repeatedly notes that pygmy peoples are not genetically suited to playing in the NBA. But being of smaller stature does not mean that they lack athleticism --- it means that if you define athleticism in a certain way, you will bias your conclusions about the impact of specific genetic factors.
Second, the author begins the book by discussing the difficulty of trying to identify independent impacts of genetics and training, and even identifies in several chapters that the tremendous amounts of genetic variation within and across groups makes attributing success to a single gene difficult. But then, the author goes on to interpret findings within the scientific literature in a very simplistic manner. For example, the general finding that individuals with lower center gravity will be better swimmers, and that white people tend to have a lower center of gravity than black people, is then used to explain why black athletes should choose sports other than swimming. However, there are multiple very large problems with this. First is that this conclusion rests on ecological fallacy --- the idea that something that holds true at the population level holds true at the individual level. Any given athlete from any racial group might vary from the trend in the population. Making recommendations to individuals based on population data rather than on individual data, is problematic. Second, center of gravity is not the only factor that might affect success --- either in terms of training or genetics. The size of hands and feet, the length of legs, the distribution of fat, overall buoyancy, etc. are all physical factors that affect performance. But the author does not discuss this complexity, the degree to which any one of these physical features individually affects performance, or the degree to which any one of these physical features interacts with training.
In addition, most of the research starts by identifying elite athletes and then searching for common genetic factors. But, again, there is a selection bias based on what activities one can get paid to perform (or go to the Olympics with). Moreover, this approach neglects selection biases associated with socioeconomic and cultural factors. For example, although the author mentions multiple times that pygmy peoples are ill suited for basketball, he fails to address the fact that they might be extremely well suited to other athletic activities --- say gymnastics. This is because there are other factors that likely prevent them from entering the field to begin with. If you're only looking for what is currently successful, you are not looking at the broader realm of potential success.
Along the same lines, its worth thinking about what types of athleticism sports are actually measuring and how they are designed. For example, gymnastics is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Humans created it. And we specifically created a sport and designed the point allocations in such a way that a woman who has reached puberty is less likely to be competitive. Does that mean that women who can't complete acrobatic tumbling routines are less athletic than those that can? No, it means that sports are designed to favor certain types of activities, body types, and levels of development. Unless you're willing to wrestle with a different way of defining athleticism, you absolutely have to wrestle with how the structures/rules/design of sports affects how you're measuring athleticism and what genetic factors might influence success.
Similarly, the author never addresses how norms and institutions within sports affect how successful one body type might be. For example, while height and long arms are certainly beneficial in basketball, individual success is partly determined by interactions of other factors --- quality and chemistry of teammates, types of plays, type defense, etc. Part of the game itself is finding ways to exploit weaknesses in your opponents system --- and many of those weaknesses are not about height. It's possible for a shorter person to be highly competitive when playing on a team that uses that individual in specific ways. The author only addresses this in the case of dog-sledding, when he discusses the marathon strategy over the sprint strategy. But the same thing is relevant for many human sports.
The author also chooses literature/research and draws conclusions in a more definitive manner that he should given the complexity of causality and the existence of additional research that might contradict that finding. For example, in the chapter titled "Why Men Have Nipples" the author examines the difference in athletic performance between men and women. He reviews the sexual selection literature and the literature on the importance of hormones in development of muscle and bone in an effort to explain why men are more athletic than women (using professional sports as the measure of athleticism). Here, he specifically avoids a growing literature on women's comparative advantage in ultra-endurance sports and a vast literature on human evolution. Instead, he asks the question "Why are women athletic at all?" given that women only needed to "carry children and dig for tubers". He concludes that women are athletic for the same reason men have nipples --- if one sex needs something, the other sex has to have that trait to, thus women are athletic because men need to be athletic to have sex with as many partners as possible. This question and the statement about women's "activities" ignores a growing literature that challenges the idea that sex roles in early human development have always reflected today's stratified sex roles. Moreover, this conclusion ignores the evolutionary reality that women are likely athletic because they evolved facing the same predators and environmental pressures as men. Nobody thinks that female horses have four legs and are able to run because stallions have to run to round up mares to mate with. Even among his other example which focuses on the degree of difference between male and female --- gorillas --- nobody assumes the female is athletic and muscular to serve only the reproductive requirements of the male. So why the laziness of thought when it comes to men and women. I suspect the reason is the author didn't want to have to actually address the broader literature and this conclusion enabled him to continue to review literature that focused primarily on male athletes without having to further address sex when discussing genetic factors.
My last concern is one of ethics and the author's failure to address outcomes and opportunity costs associated with elite athletic performance. The author discusses the Jamaican sprinting program intended to identify and train the best sprinters. He discusses several cases where individuals are forced to forgo other opportunities --- like a college education --- by the national athletic organization in order to train for and become a sprinter. Similarly, he discusses genetic and behavioral factors that affect how individuals experience pain. In one example, he uses an example of NFL linemen and how pain can prevent a "peak" performance. But there is no discussion about why we experience pain --- what the value or meaning of pain is. With the exception of discussing how people who genetically do not feel pain tend to die young, he does not address how ignoring pain caused by athletic performance might cause tremendous harm and even lead to the inability to engage in any athletic endeavor in the future. This book seems to start from the assumption that production of athletic performance is a good that has value of its own and that value outweighs other considerations. The author never takes the time to examine whether all of the time, effort, resources, and lives dedicated to improving athletic performances, which by the studies' own definitions are valuable primarily as they are consumed for entertainment purposes, is worthwhile and valuable to society or the individual who performs them.
This pattern of lazy, superficial thought, incomplete review of the literature, and faulty conclusions exists throughout the book. As a result, I would recommend that anyone who reads this to avoid accepting the author's conclusions as stated. Indeed, I strongly suggest seeking out the studies he cites and reviewing them yourself, and considering their findings/implications in a much more cautious manner than the author of this book did.
However, after the first couple of chapters, the author moves deeper and deeper into genetic analysis of athletic performance and as he does so, his interpretation of the scientific literature that he chooses to review and the conclusions he draws become increasingly simplistic, ignoring the complexity he discussed earlier. I was particularly bothered by several recurring problems: poor definition of athleticism, drawing conclusions based on ecological fallacy and neglecting the causal complexity that the author claims to have addressed, and ignoring research that does not fit with the author's desired conclusion.
First, the author is exploring the literature on elite athletic performance, using professional athletic success as the selection criteria. But this ignores the reality that actual athleticism may not be fully encompassed or represented in current sports for which one might be paid to perform. Indeed, it might not be fully encompassed in activities currently referred to as sports. At the very least, the author should have discussed the potential limitations of using professional athletic achievement as the criteria for identifying athleticism. For example, he repeatedly notes that pygmy peoples are not genetically suited to playing in the NBA. But being of smaller stature does not mean that they lack athleticism --- it means that if you define athleticism in a certain way, you will bias your conclusions about the impact of specific genetic factors.
Second, the author begins the book by discussing the difficulty of trying to identify independent impacts of genetics and training, and even identifies in several chapters that the tremendous amounts of genetic variation within and across groups makes attributing success to a single gene difficult. But then, the author goes on to interpret findings within the scientific literature in a very simplistic manner. For example, the general finding that individuals with lower center gravity will be better swimmers, and that white people tend to have a lower center of gravity than black people, is then used to explain why black athletes should choose sports other than swimming. However, there are multiple very large problems with this. First is that this conclusion rests on ecological fallacy --- the idea that something that holds true at the population level holds true at the individual level. Any given athlete from any racial group might vary from the trend in the population. Making recommendations to individuals based on population data rather than on individual data, is problematic. Second, center of gravity is not the only factor that might affect success --- either in terms of training or genetics. The size of hands and feet, the length of legs, the distribution of fat, overall buoyancy, etc. are all physical factors that affect performance. But the author does not discuss this complexity, the degree to which any one of these physical features individually affects performance, or the degree to which any one of these physical features interacts with training.
In addition, most of the research starts by identifying elite athletes and then searching for common genetic factors. But, again, there is a selection bias based on what activities one can get paid to perform (or go to the Olympics with). Moreover, this approach neglects selection biases associated with socioeconomic and cultural factors. For example, although the author mentions multiple times that pygmy peoples are ill suited for basketball, he fails to address the fact that they might be extremely well suited to other athletic activities --- say gymnastics. This is because there are other factors that likely prevent them from entering the field to begin with. If you're only looking for what is currently successful, you are not looking at the broader realm of potential success.
Along the same lines, its worth thinking about what types of athleticism sports are actually measuring and how they are designed. For example, gymnastics is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Humans created it. And we specifically created a sport and designed the point allocations in such a way that a woman who has reached puberty is less likely to be competitive. Does that mean that women who can't complete acrobatic tumbling routines are less athletic than those that can? No, it means that sports are designed to favor certain types of activities, body types, and levels of development. Unless you're willing to wrestle with a different way of defining athleticism, you absolutely have to wrestle with how the structures/rules/design of sports affects how you're measuring athleticism and what genetic factors might influence success.
Similarly, the author never addresses how norms and institutions within sports affect how successful one body type might be. For example, while height and long arms are certainly beneficial in basketball, individual success is partly determined by interactions of other factors --- quality and chemistry of teammates, types of plays, type defense, etc. Part of the game itself is finding ways to exploit weaknesses in your opponents system --- and many of those weaknesses are not about height. It's possible for a shorter person to be highly competitive when playing on a team that uses that individual in specific ways. The author only addresses this in the case of dog-sledding, when he discusses the marathon strategy over the sprint strategy. But the same thing is relevant for many human sports.
The author also chooses literature/research and draws conclusions in a more definitive manner that he should given the complexity of causality and the existence of additional research that might contradict that finding. For example, in the chapter titled "Why Men Have Nipples" the author examines the difference in athletic performance between men and women. He reviews the sexual selection literature and the literature on the importance of hormones in development of muscle and bone in an effort to explain why men are more athletic than women (using professional sports as the measure of athleticism). Here, he specifically avoids a growing literature on women's comparative advantage in ultra-endurance sports and a vast literature on human evolution. Instead, he asks the question "Why are women athletic at all?" given that women only needed to "carry children and dig for tubers". He concludes that women are athletic for the same reason men have nipples --- if one sex needs something, the other sex has to have that trait to, thus women are athletic because men need to be athletic to have sex with as many partners as possible. This question and the statement about women's "activities" ignores a growing literature that challenges the idea that sex roles in early human development have always reflected today's stratified sex roles. Moreover, this conclusion ignores the evolutionary reality that women are likely athletic because they evolved facing the same predators and environmental pressures as men. Nobody thinks that female horses have four legs and are able to run because stallions have to run to round up mares to mate with. Even among his other example which focuses on the degree of difference between male and female --- gorillas --- nobody assumes the female is athletic and muscular to serve only the reproductive requirements of the male. So why the laziness of thought when it comes to men and women. I suspect the reason is the author didn't want to have to actually address the broader literature and this conclusion enabled him to continue to review literature that focused primarily on male athletes without having to further address sex when discussing genetic factors.
My last concern is one of ethics and the author's failure to address outcomes and opportunity costs associated with elite athletic performance. The author discusses the Jamaican sprinting program intended to identify and train the best sprinters. He discusses several cases where individuals are forced to forgo other opportunities --- like a college education --- by the national athletic organization in order to train for and become a sprinter. Similarly, he discusses genetic and behavioral factors that affect how individuals experience pain. In one example, he uses an example of NFL linemen and how pain can prevent a "peak" performance. But there is no discussion about why we experience pain --- what the value or meaning of pain is. With the exception of discussing how people who genetically do not feel pain tend to die young, he does not address how ignoring pain caused by athletic performance might cause tremendous harm and even lead to the inability to engage in any athletic endeavor in the future. This book seems to start from the assumption that production of athletic performance is a good that has value of its own and that value outweighs other considerations. The author never takes the time to examine whether all of the time, effort, resources, and lives dedicated to improving athletic performances, which by the studies' own definitions are valuable primarily as they are consumed for entertainment purposes, is worthwhile and valuable to society or the individual who performs them.
This pattern of lazy, superficial thought, incomplete review of the literature, and faulty conclusions exists throughout the book. As a result, I would recommend that anyone who reads this to avoid accepting the author's conclusions as stated. Indeed, I strongly suggest seeking out the studies he cites and reviewing them yourself, and considering their findings/implications in a much more cautious manner than the author of this book did.
ajlark25's review
5.0
Fascinating look into the role genetics play at the top level of sports. I really liked that Epstein talked a little bit about the ethics of genetic testing & the combining factors of nature/nurture. I'm excited to read it again in a few years after more research has been done and we can see how it stands up!
bboduffy's review against another edition
5.0
A fascinating look at the physiology, psychology, and genetic anthropology of elite athletic performance. Very well researched and documented.
kay85's review against another edition
4.0
As an athlete, I'm always looking to better understand performance. This book does a good job of explaining the genetic traits that extraordinary athletes have that contribute to their success.
allieischill's review against another edition
5.0
I took my sweet time with this book. I picked it up here and there for more than a year, but it is one I will definitely re-read. It was easy to digest for someone like me who is so non-science brained. It is fantastically written, thoroughly researched, and is a must read for anyone who is interested in sports or athletes of any kind.
marysasala's review against another edition
3.0
My general thoughts on this was I was disappointed. This book is a story of feast and famine. There were really interesting and thought provoking parts of this book that I couldn’t get enough of. But there were also many boring, over technical parts that weighed it down to a chore.
This book should not have taken me 9 days to read, but it was not interesting enough to want to pick it up.
This book should not have taken me 9 days to read, but it was not interesting enough to want to pick it up.
edgiles4's review against another edition
4.0
This book has been painted as a retort to Gladwell's "10,000 hours" rule, but that's not a fair characterization. Epstein does a very good job of showing that both nature and nurture (or both training and talent) are necessary for elite athletes, but perhaps the genetic side is more important than we recognize. The book is very well written, and certainly interesting.
iansgold's review against another edition
5.0
A fantastic book for those interested in the science of athletic performance.