I've seen that argument involving thoroughbreds vs. quarter-horses, but I don't recall the details anymore. I think the gist was that thoroughbreds are a totally closed gene pool, while quarter horses are somewhat more flexible, and quarter horses kept getting faster. But I have no idea what has been happening since I read that decades ago with quarter horses.
Secretariat was born in Caroline County VA, not a famous place for thoroughbreds. In my years of driving through Caroline County, it seems to be a grazing land that is long out of tobacco. I see it as a county with a group of super-landowners with family trees that go back generations. Caroline County is best known for the King's Dominion Amusement Park near Route 95. It is also where John Wilkes Booth was killed. The last Horne's Restaurant is in Port Royal. Because Route 301 runs through the county, it is a known drug corridor.
Secretariat's Belmont Stakes race in 1973 is still exciting to watch on youtube. Thirty-one length victory. The announcer cries out, "Secretariat is blazing away like a tremendous machine." I have read that Secretariat's heart was twice the size of your average horse's.
That chart of winning times 1896-2025 is a great accompaniment to this article. If you are the one who put it together (e.g. added trend lines), please take the credit.
Staring at that graph a bit more: if I remove Secretariat's 1973 time and repeat the "two trends" exercise, my Mark I Eyeball places the break point at about 1950.
Post hoc curation such as "delete an outlier that I don't like and re-do the analysis for a more pleasing result" does have its problems... an understatement. Establishment scientist/ideologues in varied fields have often fallen for the charms of cherry-picking, though.
"Fast Horses and Eugenics" is an impressive display of the depth and breadth of author Livia Gershon's grasp of the abstract. She faithfully quotes Professor of Hospitality and Tourism Management Brian Tyyrell, so he shares in the accolade.
Newspaperman Don Polson riffing on Eric Blair:"'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.' The first objectors to the thought that their ideas are 'stupid' would be the very intellectuals whose trained minds induced acceptance of said stupid ideas as delivered wisdom."
Here's an interesting question: in what field has eugenics produced the most gains and what the fewest?
Corn-breeding seems like a candidate for the most gains over the last 6,000 years. Perhaps chicken or turkey breeding.
Horse breeding over the last half century might be a candidate for least. Same for dog-breeding.
It seems like early in the process of inventing scientific breeding, it attracts the best minds of the age, but after awhile, in the fields that are less profit-driven, sillier people and faddish tastes take over.
For example, German Shepherds were arguably the capstone success of 19th Century dog breeding. But lately, German Shepherd breeders obsess over dumb stuff like sloping hindquarters.
Nobody cares about turkeys except as vehicles for making money, so turkeys keep getting more immense due to the ruthless rationality of turkey breeders.
But lots of people love German Shepherds, so they've managed to screw them up.
Modern corn production uses a lot more fertilizer than a hundred years ago. I wonder how the newer varieties would do long term with the old inputs and methods (and vice versa), leaving aside the weed problem that RoundupReady largely solves. In either direction, most soils couldn't produce anywhere near the same yields, and we'd soon go hungry if we had to change.
The Indian fish fertilizer method seemed like more trouble than it was worth. But there was the storage advantage of corn over winter fishing in the millennia before Silver Queen corn made it really good eating. Just as well the Indians didn't invent bourbon--there'd be no more fish.
Agree. I'm not sure what Steve is going for in terms of talking about corn. When I was a kid in the 1970s 100 bushel/acre in good Iowa farm land was noteworthy. By now it's probably considered a middling yield with at least 200 bushels need to raise eyebrows. I don't know how much of that is hybridization and how much is production methods but I suspect a good part of it is the latter as you note. My outside observation is that since gene-splicing became a thing far more effort is put into adding useful characteristics at the gene level than by Mendelian hybridization.
As somebody noted above, expecting race times to approach zero is a bit unrealistic. An animal with a particular stride length is going to take a certain minimum amount of time to cover a distance so at some point the physical limit of how fast a horse can go will be reached. I think something similar will happen with plant hybridization. It might be more useful to look at the extension of the areas that can support corn growth. Adding traits like drought and heat resistance or shortening the time to maturity are also useful but don't boost maximum yield numbers.
Corn hybridization hasn't directly made us fat, IMO. Yes, more cheap food in general doesn't help but I think the process has more to do with the obsession with low fat diets that vastly increased the amount of carbohydrates that people consume, especially unknowingly as starch and sugar were substituted for fat to give the right mouth feel to low fat (but not low calorie) foods.
Norman Borlaug is renowned for his work in developing high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that played a crucial role in the Green Revolution. Seems like a good example.
Another approach would be to only graph Kentucky Derby times on tracks listed as "fast." The 2025 track was listed as "sloppy" and was almost 3 seconds slower than Secretariat on a fast track in 1973.
Basically everyone believes in eugenics, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not. It show up in small ways with pets and in big ways in who people select for mates or feelings about who their kids date. Obviously that doesn’t mean people make *good* decisions when chasing certain characteristics, but it’s always a factor. It’s also amusing to see how many scrupulously progressive people who would recoil at the suggestion they are eugenicists make abortion a central aspect of their politics.
A minor possible quibble with the logic here: stud fees are a very important element in the thoroughbred business model (such as it is), so a spectacular victory–or ideally a string of them–may in fact be more profitable in the long run than barely eking out wins here and there. If you can keep your hard-running horse from breaking down, that is...
I recall reading in "The Horse, The Wheel and Language" that all domesticated horses today are descended from a single male, suggesting that the biggest problem for our Yamnya forebears was finding a stallion who who was docile enough--feminized, so to speak-- to accept domestication. From my personal experience around his uncastrated male descendants, I could easily believe that. They are scary to be around in any kind of close quarters, even in the smaller breeds. So, could that genetic bottleneck also present a unique problem in breeding for speed?
I am compelled to mention that in the "Bojack Horseman" universe (my candidate for best TV show of all time so far) Secretariat kills himself by jumping off a bridge because he got caught in a gambling scandal. He also appeared on the Dick Cavett show.
I studied molecular biology in college and I remember a professor dismissing eugenics . The party line was to show mathematically that if you wanted to breed out a single autosomal recessive allele (like sickle cell) they could show you mathematically that it would take forever given the length of human generations. So, nothing else needs to be discussed. Shut up.
I concede they are right about this particular thing. It's just no one first bothered to prove that you need to eliminate recessive alleles of simple traits in order for eugenics to do anything of value.
I spent three years at the Department of Agriculture (Ottawa, Ontario) in an area that evaluated dairy cattle. The cows were evaluated on the amount of milk they produced, the bulls were evaluated based on their daughters.
It was big business. The cows were artificially inseminated, so a top bull could have thousands of offspring. As in the equine world, there were certain famous bulls whose names were historic.
Apparently the horse world considers artificial insemination too low class.
Tom Wolfe wrote a chapter in "A Man In Full" where the rich guy takes his weekend guests to watch a famous racehorse naturally inseminate his prize mare.
The weekend guests are pole-axed by the spectacle.
Didn't realise it was Tom Wolfe but your reference immediately brought to mind the guests horror portrayed in the mini series and Jeff Daniels again showing his range
Were you expecting times to continue to approach zero?
They're near the record and consistently so after '73--I would call that a success.
Having read the Dick Francis canon, I believe there are now many more ways to cheat, but it's more difficult to get away with it.
Perhaps excessive nurture has hamstrung nature.
I can recall the Dancer's Image doping scandal at the Kentucky Derby in 1968.
You missed the obvious problem--more diversity is required in Thoroughbreds. #Arabianssowhite
I've seen that argument involving thoroughbreds vs. quarter-horses, but I don't recall the details anymore. I think the gist was that thoroughbreds are a totally closed gene pool, while quarter horses are somewhat more flexible, and quarter horses kept getting faster. But I have no idea what has been happening since I read that decades ago with quarter horses.
Secretariat was born in Caroline County VA, not a famous place for thoroughbreds. In my years of driving through Caroline County, it seems to be a grazing land that is long out of tobacco. I see it as a county with a group of super-landowners with family trees that go back generations. Caroline County is best known for the King's Dominion Amusement Park near Route 95. It is also where John Wilkes Booth was killed. The last Horne's Restaurant is in Port Royal. Because Route 301 runs through the county, it is a known drug corridor.
Secretariat's Belmont Stakes race in 1973 is still exciting to watch on youtube. Thirty-one length victory. The announcer cries out, "Secretariat is blazing away like a tremendous machine." I have read that Secretariat's heart was twice the size of your average horse's.
In humans a much larger heart is almost always bad.
A larger heart made the Grinch loveable.
That's always bother me. He should have gone to a cardiologist. Probably a viral cardiomyopathy.
That chart of winning times 1896-2025 is a great accompaniment to this article. If you are the one who put it together (e.g. added trend lines), please take the credit.
Yes, I just put the graph together tonight.
The general pattern is well known, but the graph, especially with the trick of putting the two time periods in different columns really makes it pop.
Was ChatGPT a help?
Staring at that graph a bit more: if I remove Secretariat's 1973 time and repeat the "two trends" exercise, my Mark I Eyeball places the break point at about 1950.
Post hoc curation such as "delete an outlier that I don't like and re-do the analysis for a more pleasing result" does have its problems... an understatement. Establishment scientist/ideologues in varied fields have often fallen for the charms of cherry-picking, though.
"Fast Horses and Eugenics" is an impressive display of the depth and breadth of author Livia Gershon's grasp of the abstract. She faithfully quotes Professor of Hospitality and Tourism Management Brian Tyyrell, so he shares in the accolade.
Newspaperman Don Polson riffing on Eric Blair:"'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.' The first objectors to the thought that their ideas are 'stupid' would be the very intellectuals whose trained minds induced acceptance of said stupid ideas as delivered wisdom."
Here's an interesting question: in what field has eugenics produced the most gains and what the fewest?
Corn-breeding seems like a candidate for the most gains over the last 6,000 years. Perhaps chicken or turkey breeding.
Horse breeding over the last half century might be a candidate for least. Same for dog-breeding.
It seems like early in the process of inventing scientific breeding, it attracts the best minds of the age, but after awhile, in the fields that are less profit-driven, sillier people and faddish tastes take over.
For example, German Shepherds were arguably the capstone success of 19th Century dog breeding. But lately, German Shepherd breeders obsess over dumb stuff like sloping hindquarters.
Nobody cares about turkeys except as vehicles for making money, so turkeys keep getting more immense due to the ruthless rationality of turkey breeders.
But lots of people love German Shepherds, so they've managed to screw them up.
Modern corn production uses a lot more fertilizer than a hundred years ago. I wonder how the newer varieties would do long term with the old inputs and methods (and vice versa), leaving aside the weed problem that RoundupReady largely solves. In either direction, most soils couldn't produce anywhere near the same yields, and we'd soon go hungry if we had to change.
The Indian fish fertilizer method seemed like more trouble than it was worth. But there was the storage advantage of corn over winter fishing in the millennia before Silver Queen corn made it really good eating. Just as well the Indians didn't invent bourbon--there'd be no more fish.
Agree. I'm not sure what Steve is going for in terms of talking about corn. When I was a kid in the 1970s 100 bushel/acre in good Iowa farm land was noteworthy. By now it's probably considered a middling yield with at least 200 bushels need to raise eyebrows. I don't know how much of that is hybridization and how much is production methods but I suspect a good part of it is the latter as you note. My outside observation is that since gene-splicing became a thing far more effort is put into adding useful characteristics at the gene level than by Mendelian hybridization.
As somebody noted above, expecting race times to approach zero is a bit unrealistic. An animal with a particular stride length is going to take a certain minimum amount of time to cover a distance so at some point the physical limit of how fast a horse can go will be reached. I think something similar will happen with plant hybridization. It might be more useful to look at the extension of the areas that can support corn growth. Adding traits like drought and heat resistance or shortening the time to maturity are also useful but don't boost maximum yield numbers.
Corn hybridization hasn't directly made us fat, IMO. Yes, more cheap food in general doesn't help but I think the process has more to do with the obsession with low fat diets that vastly increased the amount of carbohydrates that people consume, especially unknowingly as starch and sugar were substituted for fat to give the right mouth feel to low fat (but not low calorie) foods.
He did say 6,000 years. I was the one who brought up modern hybrids.
Starch, sugar, corn syrup…
Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace prize for breeding wheat. I see someone beat me to it.
Why not turning the freaking aurochs into mostly docile, milk-giving meat on the hoof instead of chicken? Seems like a huge payoff.
Not quite the same question, but the aurochs was surely more terrifying than the junglefowl, so I’d say cows are the greater achievement.
Edit: my comments pertain as much to domestication as breeding in general, so upon reflection probably tangential to your question.
Golden Rice?
Maybe natural limits to selective breeding differ a lot across species in ways that are hard to predict in advance.
Norman Borlaug is renowned for his work in developing high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that played a crucial role in the Green Revolution. Seems like a good example.
Another approach would be to only graph Kentucky Derby times on tracks listed as "fast." The 2025 track was listed as "sloppy" and was almost 3 seconds slower than Secretariat on a fast track in 1973.
Looking at the times of third place finishers might be a way to weed out the effect of tactital changes that you identify.
“Experimenting with corn-breeding is of course another pseudoscience that completely failed, as you can see by how skinny everybody is these days.”
Great line.
Basically everyone believes in eugenics, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not. It show up in small ways with pets and in big ways in who people select for mates or feelings about who their kids date. Obviously that doesn’t mean people make *good* decisions when chasing certain characteristics, but it’s always a factor. It’s also amusing to see how many scrupulously progressive people who would recoil at the suggestion they are eugenicists make abortion a central aspect of their politics.
A minor possible quibble with the logic here: stud fees are a very important element in the thoroughbred business model (such as it is), so a spectacular victory–or ideally a string of them–may in fact be more profitable in the long run than barely eking out wins here and there. If you can keep your hard-running horse from breaking down, that is...
I recall reading in "The Horse, The Wheel and Language" that all domesticated horses today are descended from a single male, suggesting that the biggest problem for our Yamnya forebears was finding a stallion who who was docile enough--feminized, so to speak-- to accept domestication. From my personal experience around his uncastrated male descendants, I could easily believe that. They are scary to be around in any kind of close quarters, even in the smaller breeds. So, could that genetic bottleneck also present a unique problem in breeding for speed?
I am compelled to mention that in the "Bojack Horseman" universe (my candidate for best TV show of all time so far) Secretariat kills himself by jumping off a bridge because he got caught in a gambling scandal. He also appeared on the Dick Cavett show.
I studied molecular biology in college and I remember a professor dismissing eugenics . The party line was to show mathematically that if you wanted to breed out a single autosomal recessive allele (like sickle cell) they could show you mathematically that it would take forever given the length of human generations. So, nothing else needs to be discussed. Shut up.
I concede they are right about this particular thing. It's just no one first bothered to prove that you need to eliminate recessive alleles of simple traits in order for eugenics to do anything of value.
I spent three years at the Department of Agriculture (Ottawa, Ontario) in an area that evaluated dairy cattle. The cows were evaluated on the amount of milk they produced, the bulls were evaluated based on their daughters.
It was big business. The cows were artificially inseminated, so a top bull could have thousands of offspring. As in the equine world, there were certain famous bulls whose names were historic.
Apparently the horse world considers artificial insemination too low class.
My foray into eugenics!
Tom Wolfe wrote a chapter in "A Man In Full" where the rich guy takes his weekend guests to watch a famous racehorse naturally inseminate his prize mare.
The weekend guests are pole-axed by the spectacle.
Didn't realise it was Tom Wolfe but your reference immediately brought to mind the guests horror portrayed in the mini series and Jeff Daniels again showing his range
Secretariat's heart wasn't that big....
Thread...
https://x.com/dilanesper/status/1786217294093582832?t=4VsULJw2HNSzeQOk6I2Eag&s=19
Of course, if you haven't or even if you have, you should read William Back on Secretariat. It's as good as it gets…. https://www.si.com/horse-racing/2015/01/02/pure-heart-william-nack-secretariat
William Nack. Stupid auto correct