The King's Selective Breeding Program With the Pot's Damn Giants

The idea of selectively breeding humans to have certain traits, goes back to the Greek philosopher Plato. King Frederick William tried to put the plan into action with the pot's damn giants. He tried pairing off guardsmen with exceptionally tall women in hopes of getting exceptionally tall children. Now that's always an iffy plan because if you pair off two exceptional people their children are not guaranteed to be equally exceptional. Instead, there's a phenomenon known as regression to the mean like we talked about in last week's episode on the Rainmaker Charles Hatfield.