First step to uplift?

[skeptical]

For David Brin fans.

David Brin's books talk about humans in the future genetically altering animals (dolphins, chimps, and gorillas) to make them intelligent and civilised.

I recently came across some research work that might be the first step to achieving this - breeding animals to be tame.
From wild to tame in nothing flat - The National Newspaper

A Russian geneticist, Dmitry Belyaev, has been breeding animals to change their behaviour, selecting the tamest and friendliest each generation to develop a true domesticated variety.

He began with silver foxes (bred for fur, but wild in nature) and was able to create a new and tame strain in 20 years only. They also changed physically, with wider skulls, shorter tails, floppy ears, and tails that wag. Sound familiar?

He also took a strain of rats and bred from them, in 30 years, two new strains. One was so friendly that they would seek out human companions, and even crawl inside clothes for comfort, while you wore them! The second strain, bred to be aggressive, was so vicious that they had to be handled with steel gauntlets. They bit at every opportunity and would attack instead of running.

The suggestion is that any wild mammal could be tamed within a few decades by simple breeding. Chimps for example, when male and adult, are often downright vicious. To achieve uplift, the first step would have to be tameness. Breed the aggressiveness out of them.

What other animal species could we breed to become companions to humans?

 

[dustinzgirl]

You know, growing up in the mountains, that kind of makes me sad.

 

[skeptical]

DG

Before feeling too sad, tell me this. Which species of animals are most successful - that is, found in greatest numbers and most likely to survive. Those we have tamed, or those still wild?

 

[Drachir]

DG

Before feeling too sad, tell me this. Which species of animals are most successful - that is, found in greatest numbers and most likely to survive. Those we have tamed, or those still wild?

True, but most of them we tame to eat - like chickens. There is something to be said for leaving well enough alone and not attempting to create a Garden of Eden out of the entire planet.

 

[dustinzgirl]

DG

Before feeling too sad, tell me this. Which species of animals are most successful - that is, found in greatest numbers and most likely to survive. Those we have tamed, or those still wild?

True, but most of them we tame to eat - like chickens. There is something to be said for leaving well enough alone and not attempting to create a Garden of Eden out of the entire planet.

^That...

And, you know, nature has a natural evolutionary scale. Dogs were naturally and over a long period of time tamed. We have no rights to go tramping around mother earth and shooting animals up and making them our pets. We just don't have that right to encroach on the natural world, which has been doing just fine long before our science came about and will do just fine long after we're gone.

OH, and if the rest of the world was worried more about the real problems with the environment, such as deforestation and our encroachment into nature and our waste of natural resources that we as a species refuse to take care of or clean up, including toxic wastes and burning of forests for farming and the destruction of our water resources and the waste of oil, rather than you know, small things like eating meat, then nature could do what it does best, evolve and grow and survive.

I've had cougars on my porch and a bear walk into my trailer. I've shot buck and fished out trout. I've also planted trees and volunteered at the fish hatchery and have reported a few poachers in my time. I am vehemently against zoos and circus's, but not wildlife safaris/protected lands.

I love wild animals, and they have a right to live without our interference or alteration of their genetic code. That's nature's job, IMO, not mankind's.

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Not a good idea.


Humans do enough damage to the environment without trying to get exotic pets. Tell me, skeptic, do you REALLY want a massive brown bear or a crocodile as a pet? And if you were forced to let it go due to feeding costs or because it's a danger, what then? Tamed animals will go feral if left alone long enough, and try to imagine what damage your pet elephant Jumbo might cause if it went feral and decided to go on a stampede?


Not to mention there's issues about adaptations of native species to non-native species and whatnot......there's a reason cages surround the lions and tigers and bears (Oh my!) at the zoo. And also a reason why normally harmless creatures (Argentinian penguins, anyone?) at the zoo also have enclosures.

 

[dustinzgirl]

Animals in zoos make me sad. Very, very, very sad. I hate seeing them all caged up like that, its just wrong.

Humans have to commit heinous crimes to get life in prison.

Animals just have to be born.

Although, at the wildlife safari by where I live and a lot of my friends have worked, the tigers are very smart and they have to continuously repair the fencing because they will get out and try to eat the giraffes, even tho they have a good plot of land to hunt on themselves, they know that the giraffes are just out of reach.

Nothing good can come of making pets out of animals that should be in the wild, they are destroying the silver fox by breeding them into docile pups.

Breed the aggressiveness out of animals...then they can breed it out of the humans too...

 

[skeptical]

It is always interesting to see the way threads that I have started evolve. They usually surprise me, and reaffirm the simple fact that we are all different, and think differently. I thought that this thread would move to some kind of discussion of uplift, as described in David Brin's books. Instead, it seems to have evolved into a discussion of animal rights. However, such surprises are what make life interesting.

Animal, or even human, rights are a very tricky subject. This is entirely subjective. And changing. In the old bible, there is no suggestion that slavery is wrong. That is not because slavery is OK, but because at the time the bible was written, the concept of the right to liberty had not been developed.

The concept of animal rights is even more recent, and there is no agreement on how far this idea should be taken. All is subjective.

DG thinks animals have the right to run free. Perhaps. However, that, like all other similar ideas, is entirely subjective and personal. I would put above that right, the right to survive. And we know that wild animals are sadly very often driven into extinction. If we were to domesticate the cheetah, for example, since it is threatened, and increase its numbers as a companion to people, would that be so wrong?

Incidentally, DG, the silver fox is not quite being treated as you suggest in your last post. It is currently bred as a fur animal. A very small sub-population has been bred to be tame. Which is worst off? The ones bred to be slaughtered for their fur, or the ones bred to become human companions?

And to go back to my original theme, is this trend a possible first step to uplift?

 

[HareBrain]

If we were to domesticate the cheetah, for example, since it is threatened, and increase its numbers as a companion to people, would that be so wrong?

On this one point, I would say yes, it would be wrong. One horribly common response I've encountered to the fact that there are more tigers in Texas (in captivity, obviously!) than in India is that at least the species won't be in danger of dying out, the idea being that at some unspecified time in the future, when the Chinese have turned to Viagra instead of tiger bone, loads of captive-bred tigers can be released into the wild. The sad fact is that they can't - without being taught how to hunt by their mothers, in the territory they will occupy, they can't survive.

I also think it might take the extinction of a major and much-loved species to wake people up to what's happening in the wild. Whilst I'm all in favour of conserving habitat, I'm not sure about last-ditch efforts to preserve the DNA of particular species.

A question following on from yours, though: assuming it were possible, would it be desirable to uplift humans to a higher level by "taming" them further, breeding out aggression, etc?

 

[skeptical]

HareBrain

Interesting question. In fact, the original article in New Scientist addressed it. The authors claim that humans are already domesticated. They think we have done it to ourselves.

Basically, aggressive humans are less likely to breed. I assume this selection is done mainly by women. That is, a woman is more likely to mate with a man who is not overly aggressive. Perhaps the lovely ladies who contribute to this forum could add their views. Are you, as a woman, more attracted to aggressive men or less aggressive men?

Anyway, over many generations, the selection of less aggressive men as mates has led to the human species being bred to be 'tame'. Lots of people will argue that we are still aggressive, due to wars etc. However, the reality is that serious aggression is rare amongst humans. Most people go through their entire lives and never experience directly serious aggression, though we read about it all the time in the newspapers.

 

[dustinzgirl]

It is always interesting to see the way threads that I have started evolve. They usually surprise me, and reaffirm the simple fact that we are all different, and think differently. I thought that this thread would move to some kind of discussion of uplift, as described in David Brin's books. Instead, it seems to have evolved into a discussion of animal rights. However, such surprises are what make life interesting.

Animal, or even human, rights are a very tricky subject. This is entirely subjective. And changing. In the old bible, there is no suggestion that slavery is wrong. That is not because slavery is OK, but because at the time the bible was written, the concept of the right to liberty had not been developed.

The concept of animal rights is even more recent, and there is no agreement on how far this idea should be taken. All is subjective.

DG thinks animals have the right to run free. Perhaps. However, that, like all other similar ideas, is entirely subjective and personal. I would put above that right, the right to survive. And we know that wild animals are sadly very often driven into extinction. If we were to domesticate the cheetah, for example, since it is threatened, and increase its numbers as a companion to people, would that be so wrong?

Incidentally, DG, the silver fox is not quite being treated as you suggest in your last post. It is currently bred as a fur animal. A very small sub-population has been bred to be tame. Which is worst off? The ones bred to be slaughtered for their fur, or the ones bred to become human companions?

And to go back to my original theme, is this trend a possible first step to uplift?

Slaves 2000 years ago were treated better than slaves 200 years ago in America, and also if you buy anything made in South America, Africa, or Asia, then Hebrew slaves got treated BETTER than those workers. And technically, there were also many rules about how to treat animals in the OT. Animal rights were also a major part of Native American religions. Animal rights are NOT new, just rewritten to fit our modern terminology.

But that's neither here nor there.

The options are not between breeding for fur (wrong, and wasteful) and breeding for pets (wrong and distasteful) as the other option is to NOT breed them into an alteration of their natural evolution.

I've never read David Brin, so I apologize if I sound like an idiot.

And I don't think that they are surviving, since they are BREEDING A NEW BREED. So thats not actually survival. Thats like saying tigers are surviving because they breed them in the zoos. They are NOT surviving.

 

[Ursa major]

Indeed: they are Tigers of a different stripe.

*cough*


Skeptical asked a question about uplift.

Being as familiar with David Brin's work as Dusty - sorry, you asked for Brin fans, Skeptical, but none seemed to have turned up yet - I'm not sure why we would want to uplift an animal. We seem to have more than enough "uplifted-equivalent" animals on the planets, although they do all belong to a single species. What would an uplifted dolphin do differently? Would it become bored with swimming about all day? Would it wish to have a body that matched its intellect, one capable of manipulating its environment?

If anything, it seems far more cruel than what we already do with animals.

 

[dustinzgirl]

Here is David Brin's site: David Brin's Official Web Site

Hopefully he will come here, he sounds like a good addition!

 

[skeptical]

A comment on breeds. When we create a new breed by careful selection, such as happened with creating tame silver foxes, we are not creating a new species. The tame silver foxes are still silver foxes. They can readily interbreed with their untame ancestor line.

Ditto if we bred, say, tame cheetahs, and bred them in great numbers as human companions, then they are still cheetahs. This might well save the species.

On uplift. This was, as said before, a concept by the Scifi writer David Brin. I am not sure why we would do it, except to create a slave or companion species for humans. According to David Brin's novels, most civilisations outside Earth had uplifted species which were treated rather horribly, as slaves. Only humanity uplifted species and treated them well. Believe it or not!

Why would a dolphin or chimp want to be uplifted? I suspect that the gain in power would be important. An uplifted species could defend itself against a previously superior intelligence that might otherwise turn its technology against the not yet uplifted ones. As we humans have done by hunting gorillas.

Would the dolphins slaughtered by the thousands each year in Japan like to be able to talk to their murderers and say : "Oy! Stop it!"

 

[dustinzgirl]

Would the dolphins slaughtered by the thousands each year in Japan like to be able to talk to their murderers and say : "Oy! Stop it!"

Now if I go to shoot Bambi and he says "Don't shoot me please!" I'll say "Look at the tag, dinner" and shoot and eat him anyways.

Creating a different breed is not exactly survival of the species. Look at what we have done to the majestic cat. Cats used to be something to be awed by, to even fear as hunters.

Now they are pampered, spoiled, lazy creatures.

However, I also realize that a lot of animals have been bred--cows, chickens, horses, basically work and food stock.

However, breeding the wild out of wild animals, well, I just can't get behind that. It just makes me sad.

Cept our cat, Kitty, She kills mice, birds, lizards, snakes and brings them to us.

 

[Drachir]

May I suggest that the first step is to upgrade humanity first?

 

[Nik]

Slightly OT, but in-laws' hyper-cute Siamese kitten taught herself to hunt garden mice, then moved onto the compost-bin rats. The BIG rats were too smart, turned too fast, so 'Jodie' culled the youngsters. Then she learned to chase the BIG rats around the lawn in circles until they were dizzy. At the correct point on orbit, she'd slam the brakes. The relieved rat would then flee on a tangent, weave unsteadily towards the hole, and stumble into the mine-field of rat-traps in the entrance...

When we moved in as part-time carers and brought our clan of cats, 'Jodie' undertook the training of the two large tabby kittens. One grew up to catch seagulls, kestrels and three rats a night...

Um, 'Jodie' can't quite figure the mirror-test, but her cousin 'Rebecca' certainly could. The window of opportunity for learning 'mirrors' seems to close at about nine months, and full-length mirrors may be required. A corner-wardrobe's mirrors did the trick, IIRC, and kitten then transferred knack to plain mirrors, shiny kettles, picture frames, even window-glass. Also, she was very bright, even for a Siamese, her litter's first-born and the litter Boss...

 

[The Procrastinator]

Look at what we have done to the majestic cat. Cats used to be something to be awed by, to even fear as hunters.

Pedigree breeds aside, I'm not so sure that the Moggie is greatly altered from its wild forebears. I'm also not so sure that we domesticated it; I suspect it may have domesticated itself. Cats are incredible opportunists and i'm sure the first kitteh that moved in with people would not have had to look far for a sucker for cute.

I like just about all creatures great and small and I pay attention to them as much as I do to people, and one thing I've noticed is that there's a small percentage of just about anything (sometimes not so small) that is doing the same - paying attention to other things in the world, including humans. Watching people. Opportunistically, out of curiosity, whatever. Whether these critters are the smartest of the bunch, I don't know. But I wouldn't mind betting that just like humans, some wild animals lack the species-absorption of their peers and are interested in other critters. Even among domestic species this trait is stronger in some than others.

I don't, however, think that we should take advantage of this to create domesticated forms of wild animals unnecessarily. We have enough pet species as it is. Tens of thousands of abandoned pets are killed every year in NSW alone. Humans have a rotten record where it comes to "pet commitment" - the creation of "exotic pets" is pure self-indulgence as far as I can see.

Uplift, however, is another question. I'm not sure what I think about it really, but a large part of me loves the idea simply because proper communication from a non-human point of view would be possible - this fascinates me! The concept of uplift is not the creation of pets, but rather the creation of equal companion species. Very tempting, very tempting...

 

[HareBrain]

Uplift, however, is another question. I'm not sure what I think about it really, but a large part of me loves the idea simply because proper communication from a non-human point of view would be possible - this fascinates me!

I think this is a pretty basic human desire - Tolkien referred to it (perhaps in "On Fairy Stories" though I might be wrong). It's also an element of a lot of "golden age" myths - the idea that at some forgotten time in the past, humans and animals lived in harmony and could talk to each other.

 

[Ursa major]

And there's always the (major) cow at Milliways....