Atlas Sports Genetics, a testing company in Boulder, Colorado, analyzes children’s ACTN3 gene, which has been linked with athletic performance. Certain variants of the gene supposedly indicate whether an individual is predisposed to excelling at certain sports based on the involvement of speed, power, and endurance in each sport. Atlas advertises its wares by suggesting to their parents that their child could be a future Olympic champion, and claiming that their test could identify that championship ability in weeks rather than potentially wasteful years years.

Currently, the predictive abilities of these tests are dubious. But even if these and other genetic tests become accurate predictors of ability, there is a lot of doubt as to whether children should be assigned any sort of ability orientation. Some note that the tests are less for the benefit of children than for parents with Olympic and All-American dreams:

“I find it worrisome because I don’t think parents will be very clear-minded about this,” said William Morgan, an expert on the philosophy of ethics and sport and author of “Why Sports Morally Matter.” “This just contributes to the madness about sports because there are some parents who will just go nuts over the results.

“The problem here is that the kids are not old enough to make rational autonomous decisions about their own life,” he said. (NYT “Born to Run? Little Ones Get Test for Sports Gene”)

William Salaten at Slate’s Human Nature blog sees something more insidious at work, noting that this test could result in our culture performing a kind of environmental eugenics, creating a Gattaca-like future where children are barred from certain activities:

What's really disturbing about this idea, in the case of ACNT3, is that it isn't crazy. The data make a strong case that being XX really does lock you out of success at the highest levels of sprinting and power sports. From an individual standpoint, that doesn't much matter: You can run track, play pickup basketball, and live happily ever after. But from your country's standpoint, putting you on the track team is a waste. We need that slot for an RR kid, and we need a genetic test to find him.

And, notes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, putting a child in only activities in which they succeed can actually be counterproductive to a child’s development into a full-fledged person:

What I fear it would become is one more way for parents to insure that their children never learn to fail. In her latest book, “Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness,” the psychologist Tamar Chansky argues that this is one of the most fundamental jobs of a parent, and one we don’t tend to do very well…If you never fail, she writes, you never learn that you can pick yourself back up again. And that’s a lesson best learned young, while your center of gravity is low and it doesn’t hurt as much to fall down.

It seems that in all this, the core problem is that parents are purchasing tests like these for their children, who are too young to exert autonomy over their situations and too easily seen as a collection of genes rather than the humans they will evolve into. Perhaps the problems of eugenics and pigeonholing could be alleviated by performing non-medical consumer genetic testing only on people who are able to consent to it.

[Atlas Sports Genetics via New York Times]

According to a release on Lightfoot's work:

"Can you be born a couch potato? In exercise physiology, we didn't used to think so, but now I would say most definitely you can," said Lightfoot.

Of course, loungers don't get off the hook entirely — Lightfoot's study showed that only half the difference between highly active mice and lazier mice could be attributed to their genetics. So an animal's environment — in people's case, whether they live in a 4-story walk up, or dig ditches for a living — is going to have a big impact on how active they are. But Lightfoot says the evidence is piling up that there's more to being lazy than we thought.

Subsequent studies have led the team to suspect that genetic differences are having a profound affect on mouse activity levels by causing significant differences in their brains.

"More and more what we are seeing is differences in brain chemistry. We are really convinced now that the difference is in the brain," Lightfoot said. "There is a drive to be more active."

I love science.

Source: EurekAlert

Though we can't be sure what their everyday interactions were like, scientists now have one more piece of evidence that homo sapiens and Neanderthals weren't mixing their DNA.

A group of Italian researchers published a new study today in PLoS One comparing the DNA from early human bones from about 28,000 years ago with DNA Neanderthal bones. What's cool about the new study is that the early human bones are quite recently discovered, and therefore very unlikely to have been contaminated by DNA from humans who have handled them.

The researchers sequenced DNA from these bones, testing to see if there was significant overlap with Neanderthal DNA, which would indicate that homo sapiens' DNA had been changed by interbreeding with Neanderthals. Many anthropologists have long believed that the two species interbred because there are a few ancient skulls whose morphology seems to be a perfect blend of human and Neanderthal.

But tests of the fossilized DNA revealed no matches. The early human DNA from the Italian researchers' sample looked very much like modern DNA, not like Neanderthal DNA. So it looks like humans weren't getting busy with Neanderthals after all. Or if they were, they didn't have a lot of babies.

28,000 Year Old Cro Magnon Sequence [PLoS One]