Genetic Lottery

File: Launch_of_Olympic.jpg (149KB, 1000x843px) Image search: [Google]

149KB, 1000x843px

This isn't an /r9k/ thread, more just an exploration of whether status in ingrained into us. Do some people win the genetic lottery? Do you think its impossible for many humans to rise above their station and become physically powerful, charismatically magnetic and intellectually talented without being born with the correct DNA, or can anyone achieve it with the right amount of time and development? Is is it both? Have humans reached our full potential or is this just the beginning of what we can achieve? Are there things out there we'll never know because our human capabilities aren't good enough to understand them?

I think its nature and nurture, but more nurture. The thing that makes me think that is how quickly humans developed between 12,000BC to 2000AD. An alien watching us from behavioral modernity (70,000BC) for 50,000 years might well get bored and say just another group of apes, 30,000 years and they've achieved nothing more than hunter gathering" whereas an alien watching from just 1700-2000 would marvel at how in just 300 years we went from pre-modernity to the internet. This makes me think there are other ways in which human potential is still untapped, but we're like the ancient hunter; we have no precedent or circumstance in our post-modern world igniting that flame inside us.