npr | We've all had the experience of watching a great athletic performance —
from gymnast Mary Lou Retton defying gravity to Michael Jordan sinking a
mind-blowing turnaround jumper — and wondered: Were they born with that
talent or can you get there with hard work and practice?
Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein says
scientists are learning a lot more about the role of genetics in
athletic performance. In his new book, The Sports Gene, he
looks at whether big league hitters have naturally faster reflexes,
whether some people are born with speed and that delicate question of
whether African-Americans are better athletes than whites. Epstein says
that science now has answers, or at least insights, into all those
questions. He joins Fresh Air's Dave Davies to talk about the secret to hitting a fastball and why slow dogs win the Iditarod.
Interview Highlights
On the truth about baseball and softball hitter reflexes
"Going
into it, I figured that they would have these superhuman reaction
speeds because they face 100-mile-an-hour pitches everyday, and
[softball pitcher] Jennie Finch's fastballs take exactly the amount of
time as a mid-'90s baseball does. So the baseball comes at 60 feet 6
inches, 95 miles an hour; Jennie Finch throws from about 43 feet at
about 65 miles an hour. Same exact time and the ball is bigger and yet
they couldn't hit it all. It turns out that even the best hitters in the
world have perfectly pedestrian reaction times."
On how, then, hitters manage to hit the ball
"They
pick up on cues from the players' bodies before their pitch. So for a
pitcher, without knowing it, the hitters are actually focusing in on the
motion of the pitcher's shoulder and the pitcher's torso and hand. And
then, as soon as the ball is released, [hitters focus] on what is called
the flicker, which is a flashing pattern that the [ball's] red seams
make as they rotate. And it's only picking up those anticipatory cues
that allows the hitter to hit the ball.
"... This is a learned
perceptual skill. And in fact, if you do a digital simulation, which
some scientists have done, where you delete the pitcher's shoulder, [the
Los Angeles Angels'] Albert Pujols becomes me, basically. You have to
delete a little more than the shoulder to get him to that novice level,
but he basically becomes a novice if you do that. And you can do the
same thing with tennis players."
On breeding sled dogs for the Iditarod
"As
I write in the book, it's not the fastest dogs that win. So sled dogs,
when they were first bred for racing, the mushers bred for speed traits,
and the idea was to race between checkpoints in the Iditarod very, very
quickly, and they topped out in their top speed. And then what became
popular because of [four-time Iditarod champion] Lance Mackey, who I
write about, who couldn't afford to breed fast dogs, he had to breed
instead dogs that were slower but would just go and go and go, and had a
drive to pull the sled all the time and never wanted to stop. And it
turns out — and scientists look at some of those sled dogs — they've
actually been bred for motivation, they've been bred for work ethic. And
the speeds of the Iditarod races are getting faster because the dogs
are pulling longer, not faster."
On the question of whether African-Americans are predisposed for athletics
"Most
of our ancestry as humans has occurred in Africa, so people have been
in Africa for far longer than they've been outside of Africa. So genes
for hundreds of thousands of years were evolving, changing inside of
Africa, and then just a tiny group of people — maybe no more than 150
people, or a small group — left East Africa en route to populating the
rest of the world. At each stop, their genes changed to accommodate
their environments and sometimes just by random chance. ... But what
this means is that most of the genetic differences that have been built
up in our history are all still in Africa. All of us outside of Africa
are just tiny subsets of a tiny subset that left Africa. So if you got
rid of everyone in the world outside of Africa you would lose a little,
but you would preserve most of the genetic variation for all of
humanity.
"... [For] a particular trait, you might find the
most diversity within an African population, as opposed to comparing
someone in an African population and someone in a European population.
So you might find the fastest 10 runners and the slowest 10 runners. But
nobody is looking for the slowest 10 runners."
