Max Marmer

Lessons in Survivial an article than ran in Newsweek details an experiment run at military training camp that explains scientifically why Special Forces units are able to bounce back faster than ordinary soldiers. The study shows that their bodies are simply genetically better suited for enduring and recovering from high pressure, high stress situations.

Morgan found one very specific reason that Special Forces are superior survivors: they produce significantly greater levels of NPY compared with regular troops. In addition, 24 hours after completing survival training, Special Forces soldiers returned to their original levels of NPY while regular soldiers were significantly below normal.

With so much more NPY in their systems, the Special Forces soldiers were much more clearheaded under interrogation stress and performed better according to the trainers. Special Forces soldiers really are special and different from the rest of the Army. They stay more focused and engaged in a crisis and bounce back faster afterward because their bodies produce massive amounts of natural anti-anxiety chemicals. In the fog of war—and everyday life for that matter—that’s a major advantage.

The results beckon the classic debate of nature vs. nurture. At present nature appears to be winning this battle, by the tide is soon to turn.

This evidence destroys a big part of the mystery of why some people are simply in a different class compared to others in their field. You can explain differences between the elite and ordinary based on this study, very roughly in mechanistic way. For example, African Americans are on average are better athletes than white people. Roughly speaking they naturally produce more fast twitch muscle fiber and other important chemicals essential for athletics.

But if the metric we’re defining success by is talent how much can you chalk up to having genes that produce the optimum amount of chemicals vs. undergoing rigorous training that increases important chemicals in your body?  Does having better genes make you automatically better than most of your peers? At present training, practice and hard work is the determining factor for most people. But that’s because most people have genes that deviate little from the average, which gives only a slight advantage in terms of expressed talent. So nurture matters a lot today. That’s where you get theses like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule. But it’s undeniable that the genetic outliers have a distinct advantage. If Lebron James never practiced playing basketball his whole life, he could still probably beat 99% of dedicated amateurs his age. But in most cases nurture still reigns supreme of nature given an average genetic composition. But the balance starts to swing in nurtures favor very soon. Most medical science today is horribly imprecise, with drugs having all sorts of unintended effects, yet macroscopically still being able to produce somewhat of the desired effect. But the biotechnology and nanotechnology on the very near horizon will allow personalized medicine and allow everybody to have the same kind of chemical advantages that the genetic freaks have gotten naturally and luckily.

Soon we will be able to model the chemical composition of these genetic freaks  and transfer that pattern to everybody. Not long after that we will begin trying patterns that no humans currently possess naturally. Admittedly all of this is a gross simplification but these types of technologies and procedures are on the horizon.

These are dangerous waters that certainly need to be tread carefully. And I sure hope open science is in full bloom by then. But don’t I must take a moment to refute the argument about how this experimentation is bad thing because we may end up with perfect humans. First of all perfection won’t be achieved because no matter how good something this there is always room for improvement. We won’t be perfect we will only have a higher baseline standard.  And there’s nothing wrong with striving for “perfection” anyway. I’ve heard many people afraid that biotechnology like this will make everybody the same, a meme propagated by movies like Gattica. But I’m sure this won’t be true. Whenever there’s been an increase in control over our environment diversity as increased not decreased. When the baseline standard of humanity’s capabilities are raised our possible lifestyles, and creative works of art and discovery will increase exponentially. Look at the incredible diversity of applications of computer technology today. All computer programs are just unique patterns of 1’s and 0’s, just going really, really fast.  Think about the difference between the current Mac OS X operating system and the punch card operating systems of the early computing days.

We’ll when this new technology comes around faster than you expect, because “technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view“, humanity will be operating on an incredibly more powerful operating system.