new start

On Thursday 18 September 2003 22:22, Al Globus wrote:
(...)
> Don't read too much in, because I'm working from memory and it's not my
> field. I think that the initial wolves were all pretty aggressive
> towards people, but some a bit less so. After 20 generations, the
> wolves behaved more like typical dogs around humans. Again, it would
> be a lot better if I could find the paper, but I don't even remember
> the author.
(...)

I used our shared expanded brain (aka the Internet :-) and then I found this
article:
http://www.biology.missouri.edu/courses/bio302_cocroft/bio302_cocroft_protected/FarmFox.pdf

I don't know if this is the experiment that you were talking about (probably
not; they used foxes in this one) but the general lines are the same.

As I suspected, there were standard "docileness" tests and division of the
foxes in breeding casts. There was (is, for the experiment continues) an
"elite" cast of extremely docile foxes and, along the experiment, they jumped
from 18% in the 10th generation to 35% percent in the 20th. (The elite class
appeared in the 6th generation - they have dog-like behavior, they
instinctively *like* humans.) Now they are at generation 30 and the elite is
80% of the population...

The article stressed something that specially worries me about eugenics: when
you obsessively selects a trait in your population, automatically you loose
the pressure in other traits, and then your population starts to display a
lot of unwanted "side effects" - they can be just curious details like floppy
ears, but there can be also creation and higher incidence of genetic
diseases/weaknesses.

In fact, for that reason I do have a racial bias *against* selected animals.
For instance, I have four cats in my house and they are all street cats with
no defined race. (Or, saying in other words, they are "Brazilian shorthair" -
http://www.petbrazil.com.br/en/pets/cats/400.htm - though this race, if it
deserves such a name, was produced not by breeding, but by our misunderstood
friend, the Natural Selection. Ah, and don't believe the stuff about
"extinction" in that page, in my block alone I can count 20 cats wandering in
the street at night.) They are very rough, very resistant to both
degenerative and infectious diseases and you only have to take them to the
vet for castration and euthanasia.

So, my suspicion is that eugenics in humans, driven by seemingly aesthetic and
subjective concepts like "intelligence", may in fact produce artificial human
races that will be weaker in all aspects but the trait that they were
selected for.

Lucio Coelho
(who, like my cats, has no "defined race" either. :-)