4 ms·

The invention of selective breeding was unbelievably late (2019)

51 points by barry-cotter 3y ago

mncharity 3y ago
I'm not sure what's bothering me about this article. Maybe... When was common-thing first done with X during the last 15 ky? Given that X was obvious once understood, and not hard to note? When the first existent written record mentions X. That... seems a fraught triple? I guess if "humanity [...] discover" has a scale or continuity requirement, that's clearly kept in mind. Eg, "the first clinical use of antibiotics was in the 1890's", the "first existent record of external cephalic version is from Hellenistic Greece".
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  The focus on animals also ignores the obvious evidence of selective breeding in food plants for 10k+ years. Specialized breeds of dogs have also existed for a very long time. This may be an accurate critique of the written science of animal breeding, and gives good examples of the reification of bad practices, but some techniques were obviously working over long periods of times whether they were recorded, or not. What ultimately bothers me about it is the same things about the "discovery" of America. Ignorance that plant cultivation and ecosystem engineering was prevalent in the Americas (it wasn't a savage, untamed, wild land at all, but had been carefully cultivated). And, in general, the idea that things didn't exist until written down by those in power. > Inventors who lived in a neighborhood with a high per capita patent rate are themselves more likely to file a patent. Future inventors might correspond with their heroes (shades of the ‘college of letters’) and, if they then meet them in person, they are more likely to go on to innovate, even if it was only a single short meeting and the hero was in an entirely different field and so it is difficult to see what key fact, skill, or wealth/object they could have transmitted which might make any difference. Conflating the credential with the skill (or here, the patent with the inventiveness).
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    You’re missing a critical insight: Artificial selection can and does occur unintentionally, ie without methodical intent.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      Rather, both can be true.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I would expect selective breeding of animals to coincide with domestication with no lag. Ancestral humans were innately familiar with animal breeding because they practiced it with humans first. They would understand that strong parents give rise to strong children and weak parents often give rise to weak children. On the other hand, the reproductive interactions of plants are less apparent.
    - brnaftr361 3y ago
      Not necessarily. There is a slew of complication that exists atop simple mendelian genetics that occur quite frequently, not to mention gametes themselves can undergo mutations. And that all assumes fertility of the select couple in the first place. And the real key here is generation times. A human takes 9 months to gestate, our natural replacement rate is 5, even now about 50% of all conceptions result in spontaneous abortion. Then 20-25 years to fully mature, and some genetic conditions only show later in life. Other animals mature far faster, mice are considered aged at 18 months, dogs are mature at a year. Teosinte apparently matures in only 180 days. Each of these has in common that within those generations there are many progeny on top of the short generation time so you can very rapidly select, even inadvertently, by picking the best and coincidentally growing them in middens. From there I think its safe to say that our ancestors weren't the dullards they are often made out to be.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  I think the article is not saying "selective breeding" in general was late, but that actually selecting for characteristics which correlate highly with ultimate yield, rather than for merely subjectively* impressive characteristics, occurred very late in the whole "selective" breeding fancy. * eg, here bulls were evaluated on (among other things) muscling until very recently, whereas in the States bulls of the same race were already being evaluated solely upon how many litres their daughters produced. Moneyball with straws. Edit: of course, if one is far from a (local) optimum, just about any breeding program will tend to produce improvements. It's only when one is so near to an optimum that most changes make things worse that one needs to get properly (statistically vs. optically?) selective...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
taion 3y ago
The premise of the argument seems wrong. Even in just Europe, there’s evidence for an increase in animal size during the Roman period, a decrease during the early middle ages, and then an increase into the high middle ages, e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-021-01426-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-021-01426-w These correspond to economic changes which made different sizes of animal more appropriate. Size and productivity aren’t the only criteria anyway – disease resistance, hardiness, or ease of feeding seem like they’d be just as important to subsistence farmers. Earlier techniques may have been less good than modern ones, but they quite evidently worked to some extent. Specialized horse breeds had gotten to the point where they needed to be specially fed way before the start of the period in the book reviewed here! Instead of positing a lack of understanding, the observed phenomenon is likely more a factor of limitations in documentary evidence (how many people engaged in stockbreeding were actually writing books anyway?) and in the actual goals of the people involved around optimizing for robustness and practicality over pure productiveness.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > (how many people engaged in stockbreeding were actually writing books anyway?) Yeah, I was thinking that a lot of this knowledge would have been kept secret as proprietary trade information.
  - taion 3y ago
    Or less kept secret than not written down, especially before the early modern period, especially outside of things like war horses, just based on who was engaged in that activity. In fact a quick glance at the Wikipedia page for medieval horse breeding shows documentation for quite deliberate, centralized, and successful operations quite far back! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages
- Robotbeat 3y ago
  Artificial selection can and does happen without being intentional.
jmount 3y ago
American hemisphere corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers were clearly selectively bread very far away from their wild cultivars a very long time ago.
- neovialogistics 3y ago
  The article is about the selective breeding of animals specifically, but there seems to be an issue here where at least four different strategy/theory combinations are all referred to as selective breeding. I don't see why there shouldn't be more precise terminology to help clear things up.
  - vajrabum 3y ago
    Can you give those four strategy/theory combinations referred to as selective breeding? I read the linked doc but didn't see it in there.
jvanderbot 3y ago
This article features some of the longest sentences I've read since Meditations.
jvanderbot 3y ago
There's two themes of comments here. First is the observation of earlier evidence of selective pressure on plants and animals that humans used (arguably domesticated) long before TFA claims selective breeding was "invented". Second is the (I guess) counter claim that selection can happen without intent by human farmers. Both are obviously true, so I don't see the need for back and forth about that. And whatever side you fall on I think the claim by TFA is almost certainly false because it posits that the first definitive evidence we have of a theory and practice of selective breeding is in fact the first instance. Its crazy to think that's true.
contingencies 3y ago
The act of agriculture itself is by definition selective breeding. For plants, taking them out of their natural environment with its co-occuring species, mycorrhizal networks, mineral composition and distributive species and sewing them by hand in a novel environment constitutes in itself a hugely genetically significant act. Even first-round seeds that germinate at all could show substantially different aggregate characteristics than those of the original wild population. For animals, those that may be caught for raising are in all probability the children of less aggressive parents. Feeding over time will cause more domestication and the removal of environmental stressors that had maintained levels of fitness for the natural pressures and begin to change them instantly. Both cases would only accelerate over generations, as it is a rare human who will later go and obtain seed or animals from the wild once a conveniently captive population is already available for breeding. I've come to the conclusion that humans, in writing their own histories, frequently give themselves far too much credit. We would do well to consider ourselves more humbly.
jackcosgrove 3y ago
If this is an example of an "invention" merely being the documentation of long-known folk practices, as some have argued, it makes me wonder how many inventions out there remain to be documented. How many construction sites, workshops, factories, studios, etc have craftsmen passing along techniques that have never been formally described? I know this type of science and discovery was much more prevalent in the 19th century when these undocumented practices were more common, but there must still be some and they must still be evolving. I'm reminded of a talk I attended in school where a guest speaker from industry came in to describe the ideation aspects of industrial automation. The faculty were asking about all these cutting edge technology and management frameworks. The speaker replied that the most effective meta-tool they had for process improvement was a wiki that the assembly line workers could edit. I am guilty of ruminating on the new hotness in SaaS apps alone at my computer when trying to come up with business ideas. I should just go out and talk to people!
pixodaros 3y ago
Aside from the massive and overwhelming evidence that people have been selectively breeding plants since the Stone Age, Gwern needs to read Carolyn Willekes on ancient horses. One of her observations is that the ancients seemed to have valued horses which were well adapted to specific environments, whereas modern horse and dog breeding often leads to animals which are poor as animals but good on one attribute which the breeders are optimizing for. The Hacker News crowd will say "oh, Goodhart's Law!" and they may have a point.

51 points by barry-cotter 3y ago

I'm not sure what's bothering me about this article. Maybe... When was common-thing first done with X during the last 15 ky? Given that X was obvious once understood, and not hard to note? When the first existent written record mentions X. That... seems a fraught triple? I guess if "humanity [...] discover" has a scale or continuity requirement, that's clearly kept in mind. Eg, "the first clinical use of antibiotics was in the 1890's", the "first existent record of external cephalic version is from Hellenistic Greece".

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
The focus on animals also ignores the obvious evidence of selective breeding in food plants for 10k+ years. Specialized breeds of dogs have also existed for a very long time. This may be an accurate critique of the written science of animal breeding, and gives good examples of the reification of bad practices, but some techniques were obviously working over long periods of times whether they were recorded, or not. What ultimately bothers me about it is the same things about the "discovery" of America. Ignorance that plant cultivation and ecosystem engineering was prevalent in the Americas (it wasn't a savage, untamed, wild land at all, but had been carefully cultivated). And, in general, the idea that things didn't exist until written down by those in power. > Inventors who lived in a neighborhood with a high per capita patent rate are themselves more likely to file a patent. Future inventors might correspond with their heroes (shades of the ‘college of letters’) and, if they then meet them in person, they are more likely to go on to innovate, even if it was only a single short meeting and the hero was in an entirely different field and so it is difficult to see what key fact, skill, or wealth/object they could have transmitted which might make any difference. Conflating the credential with the skill (or here, the patent with the inventiveness).
- Robotbeat 3y ago
  You’re missing a critical insight: Artificial selection can and does occur unintentionally, ie without methodical intent.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Rather, both can be true.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I would expect selective breeding of animals to coincide with domestication with no lag. Ancestral humans were innately familiar with animal breeding because they practiced it with humans first. They would understand that strong parents give rise to strong children and weak parents often give rise to weak children. On the other hand, the reproductive interactions of plants are less apparent.
  - brnaftr361 3y ago
    Not necessarily. There is a slew of complication that exists atop simple mendelian genetics that occur quite frequently, not to mention gametes themselves can undergo mutations. And that all assumes fertility of the select couple in the first place. And the real key here is generation times. A human takes 9 months to gestate, our natural replacement rate is 5, even now about 50% of all conceptions result in spontaneous abortion. Then 20-25 years to fully mature, and some genetic conditions only show later in life. Other animals mature far faster, mice are considered aged at 18 months, dogs are mature at a year. Teosinte apparently matures in only 180 days. Each of these has in common that within those generations there are many progeny on top of the short generation time so you can very rapidly select, even inadvertently, by picking the best and coincidentally growing them in middens. From there I think its safe to say that our ancestors weren't the dullards they are often made out to be.
082349872349872 3y ago
I think the article is not saying "selective breeding" in general was late, but that actually selecting for characteristics which correlate highly with ultimate yield, rather than for merely subjectively* impressive characteristics, occurred very late in the whole "selective" breeding fancy. * eg, here bulls were evaluated on (among other things) muscling until very recently, whereas in the States bulls of the same race were already being evaluated solely upon how many litres their daughters produced. Moneyball with straws. Edit: of course, if one is far from a (local) optimum, just about any breeding program will tend to produce improvements. It's only when one is so near to an optimum that most changes make things worse that one needs to get properly (statistically vs. optically?) selective...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

taion 3y ago

The premise of the argument seems wrong. Even in just Europe, there’s evidence for an increase in animal size during the Roman period, a decrease during the early middle ages, and then an increase into the high middle ages, e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-021-01426-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-021-01426-w These correspond to economic changes which made different sizes of animal more appropriate. Size and productivity aren’t the only criteria anyway – disease resistance, hardiness, or ease of feeding seem like they’d be just as important to subsistence farmers. Earlier techniques may have been less good than modern ones, but they quite evidently worked to some extent. Specialized horse breeds had gotten to the point where they needed to be specially fed way before the start of the period in the book reviewed here! Instead of positing a lack of understanding, the observed phenomenon is likely more a factor of limitations in documentary evidence (how many people engaged in stockbreeding were actually writing books anyway?) and in the actual goals of the people involved around optimizing for robustness and practicality over pure productiveness.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> (how many people engaged in stockbreeding were actually writing books anyway?) Yeah, I was thinking that a lot of this knowledge would have been kept secret as proprietary trade information.
- taion 3y ago
  Or less kept secret than not written down, especially before the early modern period, especially outside of things like war horses, just based on who was engaged in that activity. In fact a quick glance at the Wikipedia page for medieval horse breeding shows documentation for quite deliberate, centralized, and successful operations quite far back! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages
Robotbeat 3y ago
Artificial selection can and does happen without being intentional.

jmount 3y ago

American hemisphere corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers were clearly selectively bread very far away from their wild cultivars a very long time ago.

neovialogistics 3y ago
The article is about the selective breeding of animals specifically, but there seems to be an issue here where at least four different strategy/theory combinations are all referred to as selective breeding. I don't see why there shouldn't be more precise terminology to help clear things up.
- vajrabum 3y ago
  Can you give those four strategy/theory combinations referred to as selective breeding? I read the linked doc but didn't see it in there.

jvanderbot 3y ago

This article features some of the longest sentences I've read since Meditations.

jvanderbot 3y ago

There's two themes of comments here. First is the observation of earlier evidence of selective pressure on plants and animals that humans used (arguably domesticated) long before TFA claims selective breeding was "invented". Second is the (I guess) counter claim that selection can happen without intent by human farmers. Both are obviously true, so I don't see the need for back and forth about that. And whatever side you fall on I think the claim by TFA is almost certainly false because it posits that the first definitive evidence we have of a theory and practice of selective breeding is in fact the first instance. Its crazy to think that's true.

contingencies 3y ago

The act of agriculture itself is by definition selective breeding. For plants, taking them out of their natural environment with its co-occuring species, mycorrhizal networks, mineral composition and distributive species and sewing them by hand in a novel environment constitutes in itself a hugely genetically significant act. Even first-round seeds that germinate at all could show substantially different aggregate characteristics than those of the original wild population. For animals, those that may be caught for raising are in all probability the children of less aggressive parents. Feeding over time will cause more domestication and the removal of environmental stressors that had maintained levels of fitness for the natural pressures and begin to change them instantly. Both cases would only accelerate over generations, as it is a rare human who will later go and obtain seed or animals from the wild once a conveniently captive population is already available for breeding. I've come to the conclusion that humans, in writing their own histories, frequently give themselves far too much credit. We would do well to consider ourselves more humbly.

jackcosgrove 3y ago

If this is an example of an "invention" merely being the documentation of long-known folk practices, as some have argued, it makes me wonder how many inventions out there remain to be documented. How many construction sites, workshops, factories, studios, etc have craftsmen passing along techniques that have never been formally described? I know this type of science and discovery was much more prevalent in the 19th century when these undocumented practices were more common, but there must still be some and they must still be evolving. I'm reminded of a talk I attended in school where a guest speaker from industry came in to describe the ideation aspects of industrial automation. The faculty were asking about all these cutting edge technology and management frameworks. The speaker replied that the most effective meta-tool they had for process improvement was a wiki that the assembly line workers could edit. I am guilty of ruminating on the new hotness in SaaS apps alone at my computer when trying to come up with business ideas. I should just go out and talk to people!

pixodaros 3y ago

Aside from the massive and overwhelming evidence that people have been selectively breeding plants since the Stone Age, Gwern needs to read Carolyn Willekes on ancient horses. One of her observations is that the ancients seemed to have valued horses which were well adapted to specific environments, whereas modern horse and dog breeding often leads to animals which are poor as animals but good on one attribute which the breeders are optimizing for. The Hacker News crowd will say "oh, Goodhart's Law!" and they may have a point.