Why did humans get so weak? (And our potential)

[BenBoskovski]

Considering we share the same ancestry as apes, shouldn’t we have at least maintained a decent strength level instead of the 100% chance of getting our limbs pulled out if we would decide to get into a fist fight? If we create a scenario where we’ve got a power lifter who wants his descendants (for the sake of the experiment they all decide to start linear progression @14-15 years old and become powerlifters to make this work) how many years would it take (or generations) to get to the ultimate human freak who can now fight toe-to-toe with a gorilla?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Adaptation, Ben. Think harder -- you should be adapted to that.

[Mark D]

It wouldn't happen over generations for the same reason amputees have children with intact limbs. Getting stronger (even before child bearing) doesn't impact the genes passed to the next generation.

The only way it could happen over the species is if weak people routinely died before breeding, making strength a selected for trait.

Besides, people already CAN beat gorillas because people can make weapons.

[A Schenck]

If we create a scenario where we’ve got a power lifter who wants his descendants (for the sake of the experiment they all decide to start linear progression @14-15 years old and become powerlifters to make this work) how many years would it take (or generations) to get to the ultimate human freak who can now fight toe-to-toe with a gorilla?

Getting strong in your lifetime will not affect the potential strength of your offspring. This is for the same reason that loosing a hand in an accident won't cause your children to be born missing a hand.

[thras]

Infinite generations. Linear progression doesn’t improve your genes.

Why did humans get weaker? Internal competition has something to do with it. Neanderthals were big and strong compared to us. People who come from outside of Africa have a few percentage points of Neanderthal DNA. (You can probably imagine how that got there.). But modern humans otherwise wiped out Neanderthals. Smart and sneaky seems to have worked better than big and strong.

The progression of human weakness, however, has been going on for a few billion years. The first hominids were equivalent to chimpanzees in robustness. We’ve optimized for things other than strength, and replaced some strength applications with tool use. Humans didn’t need strength as much as we needed the larger brain, for example. We’re incredible hunters, for one thing, even with stone age tools. Wolves succeed 10-30% of hunts, and that’s pretty good. They are advanced mammal pack hunters. Human hunter-gatherers are more like 90%.

However, going forward, calorie limitation seems likely to be much less of a thing. That gives evolution some room for strength improvements, especially driven by sexual selection. And we’ll have genetic engineering before evolution has a chance, anyway.

[Bbinck1]

Humans evolved by selecting for most important characteristics that promote reproduction. It would appear that the most important factor was intelligence. You may not be a match for an ape nude but the ape can’t build a machine gun, can’t use camouflage and night scopes and really is no match for an organism that can build a bomb. It would take millions of years of selecting for strength as a primary attribute for humans to be a match for an ape, and would not happen unless selection forces produced that adaptation.

[CarteringKat]

Considering we share the same ancestry as apes, shouldn’t we have at least maintained a decent strength level instead of the 100% chance of getting our limbs pulled out if we would decide to get into a fist fight? If we create a scenario where we’ve got a power lifter who wants his descendants (for the sake of the experiment they all decide to start linear progression @14-15 years old and become powerlifters to make this work) how many years would it take (or generations) to get to the ultimate human freak who can now fight toe-to-toe with a gorilla?

I think your question comes short of analyzing the basic difference in Apes vs Humans. What is the difference?

Why Are Chimpanzees Stronger Than Humans?
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Smart News | Smithsonian

That sheds some light on that question. Another article I read a few years ago and can't seem to find stated basically the same thing and theorized that we "gave up" brute strength for a bigger more "nimble" brain which allows things like mass cooperation and development of tools that allow for better tools because fine motor skills are more useful to the collective than just being massively strong when it comes to innovation. I'm not saying being strong isn't useful, but there's a balance to strike and humans do a decent job at it in my opinion.

That same article also looked at the loss of strength in sedentary populations of chimpanzees and found that while humans lose a much larger percentage of strength(I won't make it up because I don't remember) chimps lost "negligible amounts" in comparison(again won't make it up). We've all been there. They postulated that being stronger is just innate to a chimp and sedentarism won't make them significantly weaker because of their physiology. I think this holds with everything Coach Rip has said about the structural changes required to get stronger. If I remember the quote correctly, "An athlete that is strength training will be stronger even after a layoff than he was before the start of the training because expensive changes to the body require a lot of investment and the body is less apt to get rid of them" (Paraphrasing of course. The man can speak off the cuff far better than I can even when taking the time to type my thoughts).

To address your question. Eugenics is a thing. The U.S. made a pretty pitiful attempt and frankly their definition of a "fit" person was far off the mark. If Russian biologists can make a truly domesticated fox in 30 years(or was it 30 generations?), maybe we can make an ape-strong human in 50? CRISPR is also a thing and would probably let us do it in as little as two generations, but at what cost after we figure that shit out? Turning on ape-strength requires a fee. Until we fully understand the genome and how making changes to it affects the rest of the expressed genes you won't have a human that is as strong as an ape that also has the ability to do fine motor skills(Just my opinion, I'm not a biologist). The problem is there is so much inter-relatedness in our genetics that making a guy stronger might just make him hairy as well. And his brain smaller and his body bigger. You might just end up with an ape fighting a thing that was human two generations ago, but is nearly indistinguishable from an ape. My question is, what would be the point? We developed to be smart and and have fine motor skills while also having the ability to be "strong enough". If we needed to be stronger there would be more strength. If we need to fight apes we build something to help us because that's more advantageous not to mention efficient than being as strong as an ape.

[Crom]

how many years would it take (or generations) to get to the ultimate human freak who can now fight toe-to-toe with a gorilla?

You can google "Lamarckian Evolution" to see the flaw in this.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Infinite generations. Linear progression doesn’t improve your genes.

See: Lysenko.

[BenBoskovski]

So someone who is born as a result of 5 generations of elite powerlifters reproducing, wouldn’t have better genetics?

Is genetics a personal thing? E.g. One male of the family loses hair after 25, whilst the other maintains full head of hair.