Probably since prehistory and certainly since antiquity we’ve had some ‘mesa’/‘runtime’ understanding of heritability, in contrast to (presumably) all other animals.
Like anything else, the idea of “breeding” had to be invented. That traits are genetically-influenced broadly equally by both parents subject to considerable randomness and can be selected for over many generations to create large average population-wide increases had to be discovered the hard way, with many wildly wrong theories discarded along the way. Animal breeding is a case in point, as reviewed by an intellectual history of animal breeding, Like Engend’ring Like, which covers mistaken theories of conception & inheritance from the ancient Greeks to perhaps the first truly successful modern animal breeder, Robert Bakewell (1725–1795).
Why did it take thousands of years to begin developing useful animal breeding techniques, a topic of interest to almost all farmers everywhere, a field which has no prerequisites such as advanced mathematics or special chemicals or mechanical tools, and seemingly requires only close observation and patience? … What is most interesting is the intellectual history we can extract from it in terms of inventing heritability and as important, one of the inventions of progress in the gradual realization that selective breeding was even possible.
That’s a very interesting link, thank you! I suppose my reply would be that I don’t claim that any of these attempts are particularly competent, merely that they qualify as (incomplete) recognition of an outer adaptation process and deliberate attempts at hacking it.
No, not so much. See e.g. https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Bakewell
That’s a very interesting link, thank you! I suppose my reply would be that I don’t claim that any of these attempts are particularly competent, merely that they qualify as (incomplete) recognition of an outer adaptation process and deliberate attempts at hacking it.