If you have a question for either Harpending or Cochran, please post the question as a response there. If you’d like to talk about the Q&A, this is the place to do it.
It occurred to me while I was arranging “infrastructure comments” for Q&A with Harpending and Cochran that my unilateral action to set this up might be seen by the community as inappropriate or poorly executed for various reasons.
If you’d like to express displeasure with my efforts please downvote this comment and send me a PM by clicking on my name and then hitting the “Send message” button. If I receive private messages by this method I will attempt to summarize their contents and post the lessons learned in this same kibitzing area.
Hopefully, before criticizing, you will first ask a question of the authors, and then provide feedback on the process by which this was set up :-)
Simple traits (such as an organism’s height) are probably relatively easy to alter via genetic mutations, without needing to combine many different genes chosen from huge populations. So, e.g., dog breeding altered dogs’ size relatively easily.
Complex adaptations aren’t nearly so easy to come by.
I don’t think your example supports your claim. It certainly appears that much more complex adaptations have been successfully bred into dogs. Kaj gave the examples of pit bulls and border collies. I grew up with border collies as pets and it is quite easy to observe their selected herding behaviour compared to other breeds—they want to herd everything, complex behaviour that is not typically observed in other breeds.
Casual observation strongly suggests much more complex adaptations than size in differing dog breeds and this appears to be supported by statistics like those Kaj cites. The superior sense of smell and tracking ability of bloodhounds is another example that springs to mind.
Your example of collie herding behavior is cool; I’m not sure what to make of that. Do wolves herd their pups? Or are there other plausible precedents? How complicated is collie “herding” behavior?
As to smell and tracking ability in blood hounds: given that these same abilities occur in wolves (though to a lesser extent?), my guess would be that these adaptations are relatively simple to acquire, if you have a wolf’s genome as your starting point. Designing smell for the first time would be complicated, but designing a better sense of smell from a wolf’s sense of smell might just require sending more brain cells to the “process smells” brain center, or building more of the kinds of olfactory receptors dogs already have, or some other simple shift. (OTOH, if blood hounds are sensitive to many compounds that wolves aren’t sensitive to, or if they exhibit many strategies in tracking that wolves don’t exhibit, I’d be wrong and surprised. Let me know if that’s so.)
Right, wolves pack-hunt which involves pretty complex management
of prey herds including something like a “theory of prey mind” to
predict what the prey will do.
There is a lot known about cape dog hunting because they are in
fairly open country and can be observed. Not only do they
predict where the prey herd will go, they coordinate and signal to
each other with postures during the chase. It is absolutely beautiful
to watch, like stop-action ballet.
It can get quite complicated. That video has some post-production trickery but supposedly the majority of the herding is real. Sheep herding is sufficiently complicated that there was an English TV show devoted to it for many years called One Man and His Dog. I believe border collies dominate sheepdog trials but there are other herding breeds.
As to smell and tracking ability in blood hounds: given that these same abilities occur in wolves (though to a lesser extent?), my guess would be that these adaptations are relatively simple to acquire, if you have a wolf’s genome as your starting point. Designing smell for the first time would be complicated, but designing a better sense of smell from a wolf’s sense of smell might just require sending more brain cells to the “process smells” brain center, or building more of the kinds of olfactory receptors dogs already have, or some other simple shift.
It’s worth noting that size and shape differences are unusually easy to get from wolves, something to do with unusually flexible genes for skeletal morphology in the womb IIRC.
This is a parent for comments about Q&A with the authors of “The 10,000 Year Explosion”.
If you have a question for either Harpending or Cochran, please post the question as a response there. If you’d like to talk about the Q&A, this is the place to do it.
It occurred to me while I was arranging “infrastructure comments” for Q&A with Harpending and Cochran that my unilateral action to set this up might be seen by the community as inappropriate or poorly executed for various reasons.
If you’d like to express displeasure with my efforts please downvote this comment and send me a PM by clicking on my name and then hitting the “Send message” button. If I receive private messages by this method I will attempt to summarize their contents and post the lessons learned in this same kibitzing area.
Hopefully, before criticizing, you will first ask a question of the authors, and then provide feedback on the process by which this was set up :-)
Upvoted to express pleasure for your efforts, which were appropriate and well executed. :)
Moved this here from the Q&A thread.
I don’t think your example supports your claim. It certainly appears that much more complex adaptations have been successfully bred into dogs. Kaj gave the examples of pit bulls and border collies. I grew up with border collies as pets and it is quite easy to observe their selected herding behaviour compared to other breeds—they want to herd everything, complex behaviour that is not typically observed in other breeds.
Casual observation strongly suggests much more complex adaptations than size in differing dog breeds and this appears to be supported by statistics like those Kaj cites. The superior sense of smell and tracking ability of bloodhounds is another example that springs to mind.
Your example of collie herding behavior is cool; I’m not sure what to make of that. Do wolves herd their pups? Or are there other plausible precedents? How complicated is collie “herding” behavior?
As to smell and tracking ability in blood hounds: given that these same abilities occur in wolves (though to a lesser extent?), my guess would be that these adaptations are relatively simple to acquire, if you have a wolf’s genome as your starting point. Designing smell for the first time would be complicated, but designing a better sense of smell from a wolf’s sense of smell might just require sending more brain cells to the “process smells” brain center, or building more of the kinds of olfactory receptors dogs already have, or some other simple shift. (OTOH, if blood hounds are sensitive to many compounds that wolves aren’t sensitive to, or if they exhibit many strategies in tracking that wolves don’t exhibit, I’d be wrong and surprised. Let me know if that’s so.)
IIRC, herding is explicitly mentioned in the book as a behavior that wolves do and which has been strengthened by selection in some dog races.
Right, wolves pack-hunt which involves pretty complex management of prey herds including something like a “theory of prey mind” to predict what the prey will do.
There is a lot known about cape dog hunting because they are in fairly open country and can be observed. Not only do they predict where the prey herd will go, they coordinate and signal to each other with postures during the chase. It is absolutely beautiful to watch, like stop-action ballet.
HCH
It can get quite complicated. That video has some post-production trickery but supposedly the majority of the herding is real. Sheep herding is sufficiently complicated that there was an English TV show devoted to it for many years called One Man and His Dog. I believe border collies dominate sheepdog trials but there are other herding breeds.
I think he was referring to instinctive herding behaiviors, not trained ones.
It’s worth noting that size and shape differences are unusually easy to get from wolves, something to do with unusually flexible genes for skeletal morphology in the womb IIRC.