I know that many scientists study animal intelligence, but has there been any effort to produce more intelligent animals through selctive breeding or genetic manipulation? My choice for this project would the octopus :
They are already intelligent
they have a short life cycle, so the process would go quickly
they're very good at manipulating objects with their tentacles
and also, I want to live in a world where our shores our lined with cities of sentient cephalopods.
Well who wouldn't ? But I also found the article below, which is quite interesting. The Swedes are breeding
In a Swedish lab, Alexander Kotrschal has deliberately moulded the intelligence of small fish called guppies. From a starting population, he picked individuals with either unusually large or small brains for their bodies, and bred them together. It’s what farmers and pet-owners have done for centuries, selectively breeding animals with specific traits, from shorter legs or more muscle.
Or bigger and smaller brains. After just two generations, Kotrschal had one lineage of guppies with brains that were 9 percent bigger than the other. And these individuals proved to be smarter—they outclassed their peers at a simple learning task, where they learned to discriminate between two and four symbols. This may seem like child’s play for us, but it’s a “relatively advanced cognitive task” for a fish, says Kotrschal.
Their boosted smarts came at a price—the big-brained fish developed smaller guts and produced fewer offspring. Brains are expensive energy-guzzling organs. Ours, for example, make up just 2 percent of our body weight but consume 20 percent of our energy. Many scientists think that to pay for our larger brains, we had to scale back other parts of our bodies like our guts or fat stores, and that’s exactly what Kotrschal found in his guppies.
Caveats :
It’s still a controversial idea. Just last year, Isler led a study that seemed to disprove it, with an intense series of dissections that showed no connection between the size of a mammal’s brain and its other organs (although big-brained species did have smaller fat stores). Again: more comparisons and correlations. “Careful experimental work is what has been lacking,” says Aiello.
My uninformed guess would be that bigger brains can cause higher intelligence, but this won't be the only factor. Greater complexity and different types of brain structure will also play a role.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/03/scientists-breed-smarter-fish-but-reveal-the-costs-of-big-brains/
Nila Jones Or Vernor Vinge, Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, or any number of others who've speculated about "improving" humans.
ReplyDeleteIt gets messy when you try to decide what intelligence consists of, more so when you recognize that you have to make design tradeoffs.
Current technology could probably improve on standard selective breeding, which tends to concentrate the deleterious genes along with the helpful ones. At the same time, you run the risk that "deleterious" genes might be needed for changing circumstances.
If we really start voluntarily and intentionally changing things up for humans, we're going to need both a "wild type" gene bank and parental liability policies.
The poets always say it best: Robert Frost:
ReplyDelete"And yet for all this help of head and brain
How happily instinctive we remain,
Our best guide upward further to the light,
Passionate preference such as love at sight."
If we uplift our animal companions, how would this affect society? Would it push us to be more accepting of other humans better? Intelligence is only part of it - communication is important too! Animals are smarter than we've given them credit for years because they were "dumb animals". New studies show dolphins, apes, and elephants have better memories and communication skills than we thought. We just don't understand what they are saying. If dogs could talk, think of the perspective we would gain. Or maybe it would all end horribly. ;-)
ReplyDelete