Re: Generic Dog ancestor

From: Philip Deitiker (Donevenask_at_worlnet.att.net)
Date: 02/19/05 

Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 05:03:16 GMT

G Horvat <g-horvat@shaw.ca> says in
news:ecqc11d2f3pejntim34hbbobrrpd6fv3gm@4ax.com:

> On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 17:04:30 -0500, mikelist <mikelist@tds.net>
> wrote:
>
>>G Horvat wrote:
> [...]
>>> If there is variability, what do you suppose is the cause?
>
>>I would speculate that the same variation that made the
>>difference between dominant and subordinant individuals make
>>some more submissive or less aggressive (not the same thing, but
>>for purposes of selective breeding, probably close enough).
>
> Pecking order?
>
>>I haven't seen a whole lot on that Siberian fox experiment, but
>>the ear and coat changes, changes in vocalizations and tail
>>carriage almost make it a slam dunk, since they correspond
>>exactly to the physical changes that differentiate most dogs
>>from wolves.
>
> I found and read an article about it on-line (Early Canid
> Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment). What is not
> immediately clear to me is whether the changes occurred
> naturally and the investigators selected the dogs which had them
> or if the investigators unknowingly caused the changes (and
> selected the dogs...) as not much was written about the control
> group.
>
> Myself, I'm not a dog-lover but I try to make sense of dog mtDNA
> sequences about once a year.

Dog behaviors are under selection, willingly or unwillingly.
If you take 6 dogs and put them in a pin, 3 of the dogs dig holes out
of their pins and run out on the street and get hit by a car, then
this selects dogs behavior. If you take a wolf and put him in a cage
even one raise from birth, chances are he will not stay there without
great effort on your part. If you put him in the cage and you live in
that cage, engage in hunts, and participate in wolf-like activities
you might have half a chance. Dogs also have this spirit, but they
manage to suppress it, particularly as they age.
  There was an observation made, I don't know by whom, but for each
species of animals there is a percentage that will die as a result of
the transition to captivity, anxioty of being removed and placed in
another habitat at some critical part of life. Certainly if you catch
younger animals who have not imprinted on their social group, you
have a better chance for survival. Another example, gorillas make
poor parents in captivity, of course over time one would select for
gorillas that make good parents in captivity.
  There is a certain belief that humans did not select dogs
initially, but wolves desired to be around humans. In a hunt for
example animals could be wounded and may not have died or escaped
humans, and wolves may have tracted these animals and killed them.
Later they may have even engaged in the hunts themselves. Somewhere
along the lines they had to loose their fear of humans and learn to
take cues via a different means of communication than in wolves.
Therefore the dog getting hit by a car analogy does not really apply
in this case.
  In the case of cats, cats can take or leave humans, well at least
the more robust breeds can, a siamese seems pretty dependent on human
attention. But cats function over the last 500 years is that of a
true reciprocal altruist relationship. Humans provide shelter and
some protection (biggest risk to a cat is a larger carnivore) and the
cat consumes disease carrying rodents. In this circumstance that cats
are free to roam between places to find areas where the rodent
population could support them, and as long as their diet is not
supplimented by the host, their numbers will reflect the rodent
population. In natural pesticide processes however the host generally
suppliments the diet of the pesticidal agent to make sure that the
number of eyes hunting exceed the number of pests prowling about, but
at some level the hunting eyes stop and become conch potatoes. So the
host regulates the supplimental food supply to control excesses of
natural pesticides. One can see that cats are then regulated by host,
but neccesarily controlled by host, and if the pest food supply in
plentiful and competitors or threats minimal they can, and do expand
into the wild, this has caused problems on isolated islands.
  I suppose some dogs could survive as ferrel. Dingos certainly have,
and alaskan dogs probably could. But most dogs are dependent on
humans for food supply either directly or indirectly, and most would
get themselves killed without human intervention. Certainly they
could interbreed with wild populations, and those hybrids could
survive in the wild, where a wolf might survive (IOW very few
places). This may explain poodle DNA in wolves?

  By the way, any changes that occur as a result of human captivity
are not natural, by definition the selection is artificial, whether
intentional or not. You can take for instance coat hair color in
goats. Such colors may appear in the wild but are selected against
because of predation, in captivity predators are limited, and thus
lack of selection allows certain hair colors. The traits are not
artificial, but their frequency in the population is artificial.
  Natural selection confers that the ecological balance of nature
exacted through selection such as predator/prey relationships
maintains gene frequencies and escorts evolution over time. If
natural selection is removed and replaced by human managment, then
the deviations from the wild population overtime are artificial in
nature.
  More philosophically, the nature of humans as a species of animals
revolves around our ability to interact within ecological
circumstances with approximately the same control as any other
animals. As humans have breeched those circumstances over time we
have altered ourselves in such a way as to create a completely new
modality, like the first mammal species, or the first reptile
species. The lever which we control our fate is culture, and it is
interesting to speculate when we stopped being rank and file mammals
and started being a new class of vertebrates. But the destiny of
humans actually lies in our ability to recognize what we are, in
essence the person who defines artificial selection abstractly has
defined the new order of animals which we exist, whereas the
individuals who first began domesticating animals becomes the
empericist.
  From an abstract point of view, recognizing that dogs are
domesticant of wolves, cats of wild cats, allows humans then to test
their ability to domesticate a large variety of animals, from bats to
Discus, to scorpions, then E. coli, viruses, the we become masters of
their enzymes, which we use to manipulate DNA, and of course now
we are directly changing many species. Realizing what we are is
powerful, and in this regard specimen that are capable of realizing
the power of humans may be the ones that survive and those that fail
to do so may go extinct. This is becoming true in wild populations as
well as in domesticated populations, and in places of the world where
animals attack humans, the perpetrating animals are euthanized, the
remnant population is changed, they become shy around humans and
avoid human contact.
  In other instances, certain animals, such as birds and squirrels
there is a selection for a bravado around humans. A squirrel would
never knowingly let himself get withing 100 feet of an Owl for
example can be foraging behind a park bench right next to where
humans are feeding birds waiting for a moment to take his fill. There
was a squirrel that was so brave he used to harass my neighbor for
food, unfortunately he was too brave, and I am not into feeding wild
animals unless it is to get rid of a pest. The birds learn to live
under the eves of houses, take dog food from bowls, eat seed and
bread crumbs left close by, and generally if you sit still for more
than a few moments you will find them creeping up behind you. These
animals are not a threat to humans, and don't see humans as
predators, but as a food supply, overtime there bravado could evolve
until the are innately capable of feeding direct from the hand of
humans.
  IOW, by our very nature of what we are we cannot help but interfere
in the evolution of other animals, and the closer we are to those
animals the more likely and faster we are to interfere with their
evolution. The result of that interferance has to be filtered through
the biology of the animal itself, the relationship of humans to the
niche occupied by that animal, and the desire and needs of humans. In
the case of the fox, we desired to see how long it would take to make
a dog of a fox, and the result is dog like patterns in the fox.
  A better experiment would have been to take a pack of full grown
grizzley bears and see how long it would take to make a st.bernard
out of them, lol. Alternatively take a pack of wild coyotes, who can
easily revert back to the wild and endure human presense with
defiance, and see how well the domestication experiment goes (maybe
they could turn them into something that could track down and kill
these damn wild pigs these morons released over south and east
Texas).
   

-- 
Philip
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