tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post8632109948779568398..comments2024-03-26T22:16:26.572-04:00Comments on Terrierman's Daily Dose: From Bassets to Auschwitz in 50 YearsPBurnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05781540805883519064noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post-44425036436205136362010-04-25T09:18:07.396-04:002010-04-25T09:18:07.396-04:00The term "smart" is so vague and amorpho...The term "smart" is so vague and amorphous as to be nearly impossible to define. Only an idiot thinks an IQ test measures human intelligence. What it mostly measures is memory and language. The idea of intelligence is that there is one kind (not true) and that it's measurable on a gradient. If we cannot measure IQ very well for humans, and cannot do it at all for dogs, doing it across species would be even harder. As you note, Retrieverman, so much of what we call intelligence is really experience, and dogs (smaller brains or not) get a lot of that, even if it is not the same deep woods experience a wolf might get.<br /><br />If you study the mythology around foxes, you will see they are credited with being very cunning. In fact, they are merely very wary, which we credit as intelligence. Is it the same thing? I don't think so!<br /><br />P.PBurnshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05781540805883519064noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post-38310098022689377232009-11-16T12:36:57.818-05:002009-11-16T12:36:57.818-05:00I'm not one of those people who thinks that do...I'm not one of those people who thinks that dogs are stupid compared to the wild species.<br /><br />And every time I read some account of it, I just cringe. Most of these accounts come from people who were either eugenicists or in some way influence by romantic notions of natural selection. You can find this in both Herbert Spencer and the ideas inherent in Nazi "science." In both of these ideas, there is an assumption that nature makes things fitter and smarter while civilization makes things more decadent, lazy, and stupid. <br /><br />It is poppycock. Both of these put selective pressures on organisms. And the results are quite different, but to say that one is better than the other, well, I'd have to be Nazi or a Spencerian to believe it.<br /><br />What is more likely is that the dog grew up chained. Its brain was never stimulated as a pup. The fox grew up running around, and its brain did get stimulated as it grew.<br /><br />My own dog is an expert at doing these sorts of behaviors in which she uses her paws to manipulate objects that have gone beyond her reach. She (and all of my goldens) have figured out how to open certain dogs (which dogs are supposedly incapable of doing but wolves are).<br /><br />Dogs may have smaller brains than wolves, but it seems that those brains are smaller but I think it's a big stretch to say that wolves are smarter than dogs.<br /><br />Dogs are doing things that wolves never could do, even with their bigger brains. (And coyotes have bigger brains in proportion to their body sizes than either dogs or wolves.)<br /><br />The dog has cognitive abilities that wolves simply do not have. Their smaller brains have a "program" that allows them to learn very easily from our species.<br /><br />There was an American study recently that claimed to have destroyed the original study that showed that wolves don't have these abilities. It said that original study didn't use imprinted wolf pups, which is nonsense. The one in Hungary used wolf pups that were raised as dogs. They didn't have these abilities. Perhaps the reason why the US study had different results is that many, many populations of captive wolves are actually hybrids or are descended from wolves that have been bred in captivity for more generations.<br /><br />I've never bought into this dogs are degenerate wolves nonsense that gets bandied about. Wolves have to deal with the rigors of the natural world. Dogs have to deal with something far worse. They have to live with mercurial, naked apes with God complexes.<br /><br />If you don't think that requires a certain kind of intelligence, then I don't know what does.Retrievermanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15780519136583108632noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post-30150378208167294222009-11-16T12:07:07.151-05:002009-11-16T12:07:07.151-05:00Selection is what makes the world go around, as Ch...Selection is what makes the world go around, as Charles Darwin so famously pointed out. <br /><br />And as Robert Bakewell pointed out, if you are breeding animals carefully and evaluating them on some kind of axis of production (meat, eggs, milk, speed, work), you can improve on natural selection with UN-natural selection, and do so pretty quickly (though perhaps not forever). <br /><br />The problem comes when you have no idea what you are evaluating for, and/or when it is entirely subjective and/or meaningless. We call that stupidity and evil in the modern world, but it has many names, including racism, sexism, hate, and prejudice.<br /><br />The first dog show was sponsored by a gun maker, and the dogs were bird dogs, but already the format was flawed. You cannot evaluate a bird dog in a ring; you evaluate it in a field with birds in the grass. So, to put a point on it, the entire premise of dogs shows was flawed from the beginning. They have never been anything more than beauty shows evaluating breeding stock on the WRONG axis of production and to the detriment of the animals themselves. <br /><br />In the American Kennel Club you CANNOT require a breed to have a health check before registration. What matters is not health or performance, but breed purity alone. And when it comes to breed purity, the Kennel Club is still wrapped around that even "one drop" of foreign blood is compelte contamination. I think even the Grand Dragon of the KKK might blush at that notion!<br /><br />PatrickPBurnshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05781540805883519064noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post-70921692736744518522009-11-16T11:25:17.443-05:002009-11-16T11:25:17.443-05:00I think there's a danger of conflating ordinar...I think there's a danger of conflating ordinary selection with eugenics ideology.<br /><br />The former is generally based on empirical observation, and can be very "scientific" in its application, whether the person doing the selecting is Gregor Mendel or an illiterate Burmese buffalo herder. One of the first things that an empiricist breeder learns -- if she's any good -- is that when one selects for one quality, other desirable traits may drop by the wayside.<br /><br />Still, few people who eat will argue that maize is not an <i>improvement</i> over teosinte for human purposes. It's not always necessary to put that word into scare quotes.<br /><br />And of course, observations aren't always accurate or significant, leading to superstitious beliefs that equate one-time correlation with causation. (No, dogs with black pigment in their mouths are not "better dogs" than those without. For that matter, black-haired cattle don't taste better than red ones.) This is a general human frailty.<br /><br />Eugenics, in contrast, marries some empiricism with ideology -- and the ideology that comprises unscientific values such as "purity" always wins over the empirical. Platonism does not negotiate with reality.<br /><br />And I can think of no area of modern life where unconscious Platonism holds court so absolutely than in the "breed standards" of fancy animals, which admit that they describe a "perfect" specimen that has never existed. The Form of the Poodle, as it were. (I say unconscious because 99% of dog fanciers couldn't name the author of <i>The Republic</i> if Glaucon bit 'em in the ass.)<br /><br />Contrast with empirical biology, living in the messy world of nature, where species are traditionally described starting with a "type specimen" that -- if they have enough data -- lies near the middle of the range of observed variation. Very Aristotelian.Heather Houlahanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13891198124130533198noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post-35046291143544214102009-11-16T08:50:29.649-05:002009-11-16T08:50:29.649-05:00Eugenics is a seductive but dangerous concept. You...Eugenics is a seductive but dangerous concept. Your blog clarifies the dangers.Davehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08714758362452833076noreply@blogger.com