#identically different

“Ninety per cent of elite Kenyan runners come from the same tiny area of the Rift Valley near a small town called Eldoret and belong to the same tribe, the Kalenjin.

However, unexpectedly, they were actually not generally related to each other, but did have a few unusual environmental factors in common.

They lived at altitude all their lives, which increased the number of red blood cells circulating oxygen naturally.

They also ran to school every day in their school uniforms – an average of eight to ten miles a day.

So again by the age of 18 they had accumulated vast hours of running, which felt natural for them.

At the time a US car bumper sticker read ‘Give our athletes a chance – donate school buses to Kenya’.

Haile Gebrselassie, the world record holder in the marathon and perhaps the greatest distance runner ever, was not Kenyan – he was Ethiopian.

Although he too ran to school from the age of five, despite his skin colour his genes, like most of his countrymen’s, are much more similar to Europeans’ than to Kenyans’.

While we are readily biased by the colour of someone’s skin when predicting their physical or intellectual abilities, surprisingly skin colour is controlled by just a handful of genes, and is a poor guide to the other 25,000 underneath.

Indeed there is more genetic diversity in one small area of Africa than there is in the whole of Europe. (…)

Over 35 years ago a nearforgotten study looked at 61 pairs of twin schoolgirls and found a clear genetic influence on motivation – so the genes for this trait could be the most important genes of all.

The pro-training camp often forget that by only looking retrospectively at the successes you don’t see how they have been slowly selected for this trait.

Nor can you see all the others who gave up years before, demotivated.

More often than not one of the parents had the same steely determination, even if they never practised the same skill.

So the key motivation factor is again likely to be a mix of genes and environment.

What happened to the offspring of the cohort of medal-winning Kenyan athletes of the 70s and 80s? Well, the trophy cupboards were bare in the 1990s.

The genes on their own were not enough, and the next generation didn’t produce any prodigies or win any medals at all. 

Perhaps because the medal-winning family had prospered, the drive and hunger to succeed was now gone.

@pragnificent is literally trying to kill me

“After the fall of the Ceausescu communist regime in 1989, the West was able to see the wider legacy of his policy.

In 1966, a year after Nicolae Ceausescu came to power, Romanian State Decree No. 770 declared abortion illegal for any woman under 45 who had not yet produced four children.

In 1989, in pursuit of a larger workforce, this was increased to five. Birth control was virtually unavailable, except for those with access to the black market.

The result, because of the poverty and lack of space: an orphan population of over 120,000.

When Western doctors entered the orphanages a few years later they were shocked not only at the filth and health of the kids but at the standards of care and apathy of the staff.

They were casually chatting, laughing and smoking in the corridors while the babies literally rotted in their rows of cots behind closed doors.

They estimated that each baby got only about six minutes of stimulation per day.

Toys were not allowed, as the few they had caused fights between the older children and so were only brought out for visitors. (…)

When they assessed behaviours at follow-up for up to 15 years, although there were a few severely disturbed children, most had improved. 

However, on average they still showed persistent problems with attachment, inattention, overactivity and autistic-like behaviour.

The study suggested that the first six months of deprivation were the most crucial, with longer durations of misery strangely not making them any worse.

Most of the major physical problems and most of the cognitive deficits had actually resolved fully with good nutrition and stimulation.

Oddly they found no significant increases in the risk of other problems such as emotional difficulties, peer relationships or conduct problems.

Also 20 per cent were found at age four to 15 to be completely unaffected in any domain whatsoever – suggesting that some children were incredibly resistant to the most appalling of conditions, and that environmental determinism is no more absolute than genetic.

The data pose many questions. Why should some children be affected so much more than others? Why could some stay normal?

Other studies found that the brains of these deprived children showed abnormal metabolism based on PET (positron emission tomography) scans in many parts of the brain responsible for emotions and empathy.

“After the fall of the Ceausescu communist regime in 1989, the West was able to see the wider legacy of his policy. 

In 1966, a year after Nicolae Ceausescu came to power, Romanian State Decree No. 770 declared abortion illegal for any woman under 45 who had not yet produced four children. 

In 1989, in pursuit of a larger workforce, this was increased to five. Birth control was virtually unavailable, except for those with access to the black market. 

The result, because of the poverty and lack of space: an orphan population of over 120,000. 

When Western doctors entered the orphanages a few years later they were shocked not only at the filth and health of the kids but at the standards of care and apathy of the staff. 

They were casually chatting, laughing and smoking in the corridors while the babies literally rotted in their rows of cots behind closed doors. 

They estimated that each baby got only about six minutes of stimulation per day. 

Toys were not allowed, as the few they had caused fights between the older children and so were only brought out for visitors. 

Sadly the situation didn’t improve much under Ceausescu’s successor Iliescu, who unbelievably kept the same incompetent health minister and the same ideas about the strong role of the state in childcare.