Scientifically speaking, is a human like Joseph G. Newton actually possible? Like if you selectively bred the smartest and most athletic humans with each other over 400 years, can you get a person that is basically superhuman by normal standards?
>>16935848That's the most pathetic attempt at a drawing of a muscular male I've ever seen. Please tell me this is fan art.
>>16935849Yeah, that one specifically does look retarded.
Humans are literally nerfed, neotenous sissy apes, you just need a few mutations to switch back on some of the muscle-boosting genes to get super strength and gigachad physique, some humans occasionally get one of those by blind luck.And of course you can improve on intelligence, it's how we ended up a hundred times smarter than chimps, but it's somewhat harder to improve upon our neural architecture since we're pretty maxed out already. We could at least selectively breed to produce present day supergeniuses reliably.
>>16935848Yeah, we got Trump.
>>16936010>>16935851But do you think these physical abilities are possible with enough selective breeding?
>>16936186In theory, I don't see why not. Birds evolved from rather sluggish reptiles to twitchy freaks who can tireless fly across oceans without sleep or rest. For that matter cetaceans evolved from basal mammlians to pseudo sharks who can similarly swim without end. Selective breeding can bring about, in centuries, changes that would have taken millions of years otherwise.Joseph's physical feats aren't absurd. 186 IQ isn't even superhuman, running a marathon "at full speed" likewise is fairly reasonable (current world record is almost exactly 2 hours, or about 21 km/h)The key problem though is that you need specific mutations to actually arise in a population to selectively breed them.
>>16936239What do you think that would look like though? If you bred Usain Bolt with Sifan Hassan, would there child now be the greatest runner on the planet? And then if that child bred with Brian Shaws off-spring,do you now have the ideal all around athlete?
>>16936365It could take several rounds of breeding, some of the involved alleles also work best when homozygous or when heterozygous (when you have a copy from each parent or when you only have one copy), and sometimes the phenotype improvements have incompatible trade-offs. For example, producing more alpha-actinin-3 gives you more type II muscle fibers (fast twitch), which makes you a better sprinter, while producing less alpha-actinin-3 gives you more type 1 muscle fibers (slow twitch, more efficient), which makes you a better endurance runner. So a specimen with both the aa3 mutations that Usain Bolt and Sifan Hassan have might actually be a relatively unremarkable runner (compared to them.) But aa3 production/muscle fiber distribution isn't the only advantage such athletes have.Oh, and world-class athletes also need specialized training to live up to their genetic potential in a particular competition. Overall, though, yes, if you have a breeding population starting from specimens like these you're going to produce a very high average athletic ability and I would expect their descendants to break world records in their chosen tracks, even if for example one guy is the new world champion sprinter while his cousin is the world champion marathon runner, while their siblings could compete at national levels, and every one of them could outrun the average human at similar levels of training. You're also increasing the probability that mutations which make the changes even more dramatic appear that aren't currently found in human populations (which could also lead to new genetic disorders, but you breed those out)
>>16935848If you want it that bad it would be a lot easier to just edit in the genes you want and edit out the ones you don't. Don't rely on the inefficiencies of sexual reproductionHell, throw in some animal genes as well. Wildebeast muscles are much more efficient and produce less waste heat, Shrimp nerves conduct several times faster (imagine thinking at four times the speed), lots of animals can see in the dark, throw in some extra mitochondria like lots of other organisms have to maximise ATP production, etcYou could probably get all this done by the end of the century rather than waiting on some 400 years of rubbing uglies
>>16936485That's literally the plot of TerraFormars.
>>16936485We'd fuck it up somehow and end our species.
>>16936485CRISPR is a nothingburger.
>>16935848Humanity actually achieved this with cro-magnons though?
>>16939758Were cro-magnons 180IQ?
