Do You DNA?

It seems that every month we hear about more ways that technology can be used to help us determine our future. DNA testing can indicate your risk of acquiring diseases, fertility advances can help you choose the gender of your child, you can even choose your spouse based on their predisposition for becoming ill or passing on genetic conditions.

And now DNA testing can be used to determine a child’s athletic abilities.

According to a November 2008 article in The New York Times, “The test’s goal is to determine whether a person would be best at speed and power sports like sprinting or football, or endurance sports like distance running, or a combination of the two.”

Let’s allow that to sink in for a moment.

I’m guessing that many of you just dropped your head in your hands and said “Oh no”, but maybe more than a few of you said “Oh yes” and called the doctor to find out when, where, and how much.

I mean, why bother wasting time trying different sports when you can know upfront in which your child will succeed? Why would we ever wish to make them struggle? Nothing can be learned from failing at something, right?

I can see the gym notes now “Please excuse Johnny from soccer today. He is not genetically designed to play that sport. He will resume PE when you begin the section on basketball as his DNA test shows that he is inherently a jumper. Thank you.”

Before you get too excited, here are some more details. The test analyzes the ACTN3 gene, which has been linked to athletic abilities. However, some experts are skeptical that just one gene would be such a strong determinant of potential. One expert who has studied ACTN3 but has reservations about its influence is quoted in the article stating that athletic performance has been found to be affected by at least 200 genes.

“The company is focused on testing children from infancy to about 8 years old because physical tests to gauge future sports performance at that age are, at best, unreliable.” Perhaps they are unreliable because success is more than just biologically-programmed.

While the science may be enlightening, there arises the eternal question of nature versus nurture. Sure, you may be genetically predisposed for some advantages or disadvantages, but how much of a role does our environment play in realizing these possibilities?

This is a question that is also explored in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book, Outliers, in which he provides analysis of some of the biggest successes in business, sports, and entertainment. He theorizes that it is not just talent that creates success, but also circumstance. For example, he cites the much greater success of geniuses from wealthy families versus geniuses from disadvantaged families (more opportunities) and the higher success of individuals born in years with lower birth rates (less competition).

On the sports front, Gladwell finds that 40% of professional hockey players in the world’s best leagues were born in the first three months of the year, while only 10% were born in the last three. He hypothesizes that since the cutoff birth date for many youth hockey leagues is January 1, the children born in the beginning of the year have the advantage of being a little bit older, stronger, and bigger than those born at the end of the year. This often results in the older children earning spots on the premiere teams that give them the best training, turning their birth advantage into a true experiential advantage.

As an individual example, Gladwell presents Bill Gates as not only brilliant and ambitious, but also as having had a rare opportunity to spend a lot of time with computers at the onset of their development, as his high school had a computer club when few others did. He was also born in the exact year (1955) that resulted in his coming of age at the forefront of the personal computer age.

While some of Gladwell’s conclusions are broad and some of his evidence is shaky, his conclusions are probably embraced at some level by all of us. This is why we move to communities with good school systems, send our fall birthday children to Pre-K, and seek the best instructors in all things.

Or do you want to let a swab of the cheek set the rules?