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That's the conclusion of a Reuters article, which describes a book by Australian science writer Peter McAllister. The book is titled, Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male.

At some level, there's no denying that Nature doesn't make men like she used to. As I detailed in Slate last spring, our skeletal muscles have half the strength of chimpanzee muscles, holding their mass constant. Neandertals were comparatively stocky and muscular -- especially compared to their mass -- leaving modern human hunter-gatherers in the dust.

But Neandertals weren't built like modern-day weightlifters. So I'm always skeptical when I see direct comparisons of ancient and modern people. The changes aren't always in the direction you might assume.

McAllister's bottom line is perfectly accurate:

"The human body is very plastic and it responds to stress. We have lost 40 percent of the shafts of our long bones because we have much less of a muscular load placed upon them these days.

"We are simply not exposed to the same loads or challenges that people were in the ancient past and even in the recent past so our bodies haven't developed. Even the level of training that we do, our elite athletes, doesn't come close to replicating that.

Not all the skeletal changes in recent populations have been caused by plasticity; there are some good reasons to think that our recent gracility is a product of evolutionary change. But it is entirely true that our bone cross-sectional areas have greatly reduced, with consequent reductions in compressive and torsional strength. We don't suffer the stresses of the past, and our bones are weaker than ancient peoples' -- at least in comparison to our mass.

That's the complicated part of any comparison -- men in Westernized nations today tend to be bigger than many ancient groups of people. If you're going to compare "wimpiness" between Neandertals and living men, you have to understand the relative masses.

Let's take McAllister's example of a hypothetical body-building Neandertal woman:

McAllister said a Neanderthal woman had 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European man. Trained to capacity she would have reached 90 percent of Schwarzenegger's bulk at his peak in the 1970s.

"But because of the quirk of her physiology, with a much shorter lower arm, she would slam him to the table without a problem," he said.

The shorter lower arm is clearly true -- Neandertals had short arms, and particularly short lower arms. But today's women have short lower arms compared to men, and they don't routinely win arm-wrestling contests. It does come down mostly to muscle.

Did Neandertal women really have 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European men? At 60-80 kg in mass, Neandertal women were between the 5th and 50th percentiles for American white men (link). Neandertals were leaner than American men today, but females are not as lean as males. Women today have a muscle mass between 15 and 25 kg; men between 20 and 40 kg. Conceivably, a Neandertal woman would have been comparable to today's men in terms of muscle mass, but I don't see an obvious basis for the idea that Neandertal women were 10 percent more muscle-bound than men today.

What about speed?

His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed, of six men chasing prey.

An analysis of the footsteps of one of the men, dubbed T8, shows he reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge. Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 meters record of 9.69 seconds at last year's Beijing Olympics.

In an interview in the English university town of Cambridge where he was temporarily resident, McAllister said that, with modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.

Usain Bolt's 10m split times in the 2008 Olympic 100m race are posted here. The top speed of just over 42 kilometers per hour corresponds to a 10m split of 0.82 seconds.

A speed of 37 kph would correspond to a 10m split of 0.97 seconds. If the ancient Australian ran the same 100m race profile as Usain Bolt, with split times based on the proportion 0.97/0.82 compared to Bolt's, the 100m time would be 11.46 seconds, compared to Bolt's 9.69.

The Wisconsin high school track record 100m time is 11.84 seconds. For girls. The boys' record is 10.27 seconds.

Now I'm not saying that 37 kph isn't an impressive speed -- there's no way I could run that fast, even if I were being chased by a Sasquatch. My point is just that there isn't very much time separating a good high school athlete from the World Record. Sprinters spend an intense effort training to shave a miniscule fraction off their times.

Maybe it's true that modern shoes and a good training regimen could have made this ancient Australian into a Bolt-beater. Several aboriginal Australians have become world-class track athletes. Running with bare feet on natural substrates is tough -- although some modern track athletes have preferred to train that way.

But it's hardly a knock against "modern males" to say that ancient footprints would have crossed the finish line a second slower than the fastest Wisconsin boys.

Anyway, the article notes a few more anecdotes from the book. On the whole, it sounds like the book has some interesting stories. McAllister may be on safer ground with many of his ancient historical cases -- the marvelous endurance of Athenian rowers and Roman legionnaires, for example. The main idea is the recent decline in skeletal robusticity, which is well documented.

The AP's Howard Fendrich reports on an American Enterprise Institute conference about gene doping:

Gather a roomful of anti-doping experts, administrators, academics and athletes alike — something a conservative think tank did Thursday — and there is no consensus as to whether gene doping, thought by some to be the next frontier in Olympic cheating, is at hand.

Indeed, there isn't even consensus on whether it would be a bad thing.

The article is not really an in-depth coverage of the issue, but merely trades back-and-forth quotes from various conference participants. It's still interesting, though:

John Leonard, executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Association, told of conversations he has had with coaches and scientists in China.

"We are really naive if we are to believe that the Chinese at this point are clean or that they are the only country in the world that is experimenting with genetic enhancement as we speak," said Leonard, who was not a panelist but attended the conference and spoke during question-and-answer periods.

"There are lots of countries in the world who couldn't care less about doing it safely, and there are lots of athletes who will take the chance that they will die in order to win medals. ... Will the United States have the same viewpoint when we start losing gold medals?"

The views of the pro-doping people seem to have been well represented, along with Edwin Moses and others who are anti-doping.

The AP is running this:

LONDON - Scientists are racing to develop a test to catch athletes who may attempt to boost performance by manipulating their genes.

The premise is that athletes will use gene therapy techniques, using retroviral vectors, to amp up the expression of certain performance-enhancing genes. So the anti-doping folks want to screen for antibodies:

At the World Anti-Doping Association, researchers are trying to track the immune traces left by the viruses commonly used in gene doping. Gene transfers are most effectively performed with viruses, which have had any dangerous properties removed. In most cases, viruses tend to leave behind incriminating antibodies.

This is the same principle that incriminated Floyd Landis' urine samples -- it wasn't the presence of a high testosterone level, it was the presence of an isotopic signature (supposedly) distinctive to synthetic testosterone. (I should mention, I believe Landis is innocent, but his case makes a very convenient example.)

There is a certain comical aspect to this. The article describes how the anti-doping people are trying to find ways to characterize alterations in expression for "families" of genes:

Because it is virtually impossible to identify the individual gene altered, researchers are also focusing on the secondary impact such changes would provoke.

"If you perturb a biological system, you'll get all kinds of changes in the homeostasis to keep it functioning," Friedmann said.

Friedmann and his colleagues are researching a gene doping test in mice that attempts to identify the molecular changes following a gene mutation.

"We're finding families of genes that unexpectedly change in response to an alteration at the genetic level," Friedmann said. "Those genes can constitute a molecular signature for the system having been disturbed."

Now it is undoubtedly true that an attempt to amp up some regulatory gene in order to improve performance will cause changes to the expression of a large network of genes. But I find the article ludicrous for two reasons:

1. This cascade of changes is, of course, precisely the same kind of effect that systematic training in some sport should inspire compared to ordinary, non-elite athlete people. And we don't have a clue what those changes are at the genetic level! So first, you have to start with a sample of non-elite athletes and see what changes when you train intensively. Those changes will be heterogenous to some extent between different athletes (otherwise, they would all perform the same...). So you have to characterize the normal variability as an outcome of this highly unusual training regime. Only then can you start to assess whether a competitor is "outside the range" of normal variation. The Landis example makes it clear that we aren't at this point yet for ordinary chemical differences -- his testosterone tested high, but not outside the normal range.

2. The same problems that keep us from finding a good way to identify gene doping also pretty much prevent anybody from applying it. The anti-doping people don't know what genes will be targeted, because it is not at all obvious which genes doping should target. There is no "Olympic athlete HapMap". Heck, we don't even know how to gene dope a horse (Max Zorin notwithstanding), and for horses at least someone would probably absorb the costs of experimentation. These anti-doping people are working on mice, for goodness' sake.

The article is focused on the Beijing Olympics, with the idea that blood samples will be kept afterward for 10 years, so tests could be developed in the far future to detect current cheating.

But there is a total lack of recognition of a basic reality: Somebody who actually could figure out how to genetically enhance an athlete before 2008 probably deserves a Nobel prize! And if they could figure that out, they would be a paid a whole lot more by applying their 'l33t genetic skillz curing osteoporosis or something.

Not to say there aren't candidates -- for instance, suppose you could ratchet down a weightlifter's myostatin to match this kid. It is not too complicated to make it work, it's just that it won't be made to work in the next couple of years. The trickle-down from gene therapy is inevitable, but gene therapy itself is far from being ready yet.

I mean, really, the reason why any reasonably talented scientist would deal in routine chemical enhancement for athletes is either (a) the black market and need for silence makes it incredibly lucrative compared to treating growth disorders in private practice, or (b) a much-higher-than-usual athlete-wanna-be complex. As soon as we do make some progress on these genetic systems, there will be plenty of doctors standing in line to do it. Just not so many Nobel-prize-worthy scientists. I mean, even Zorin's doctor had that whole residual-Third-Reich-loyalty keeping him in the game.

Keep in mind, that many of these genetic manipulations will be most effective as interventions early in childhood, maximizing the developmental alteration. A huge shift in gene expression a year before the Olympics will usually be a lot less effective than a small course correction in a five-year-old. And are Olympic anti-doping mavens going to start screening out people because they had a small tweak in HGH when they were toddlers?

The real theme of the article seems to be an attempt to scare athletes into shying away from gene doping. All the talk about health risks, and changing Mother Nature's blueprints, and whatnot -- they end with a warning that gene transfer may cause cancer by activating oncogenes.

But really, there are plenty of people who would stand in line to trade 20 years of their lives to win an Olympic medal. And many who think that the current winners are simple beneficiaries of a genetic lottery. As soon as genetic modifications become routine to correct developmental problems, the kids who had them will start coming up through the sports ranks. The way it stands now, the Olympics and other sports venues are staging themselves as some of the last arbiters of "pure" humanity.