Selectively breeding animals to give them human intelligence

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I think the chimpanzee would be the easiest to do this with, if it's even possible.

Thats how I came about.

You are not going to do it with breading different animals alone. The adaptations we made where because our changing environment demanded it, and we got up and moved because we had to.

It was also very specific circumstances after leaving the forest. For instance we weren't perfect hunters as early humans, we did a lot of scavenging. Almost certainly at night because were we have been found in Africa there would have been very little cover from dangerous predators like lions. Meat doesn't last very long out in the wilderness and the vultures take care of the scraps. So the only protein we could get our hands on required us to smash open bones and eat the protein rich marrow and brains. There is evidence of this and using tools like sticks to get the marrow out of the bones. No one would do that nowadays because the risk of prion attack. Maybe this diet contributed to our intellect somewhat. However we have al but evolved away from protein rich diet nowadays and simply can’t stomach it.

Domesticated animal loose certain features over time. For instance dog ears often flop down, this would not very useful in wolves. In a way human are very domesticated now. So sometimes we think that our intellect enable us to live in societies, when in fact we had no choice but to live in societies due to overpopulating the world, and we needed the right ‘intellect' to do that. We are like no other primates in our groups and social structure overlap many times.

It kind of makes the fact that we need other animals to share our intellect rather amusing, considering cynobacteria very nearly wiped out all of life i.e itself and turned the earth into a giant snowball for 160 million years. But then there was no real ecosystem or diversity to speak of. Humans are capable of wiping out all of life by accident in a way that cynobacteria no longer has the upper edge on. We depend on the ‘stupider’ beings more than you think.

No, floppy ears is a prenatal/neotenic trait. It is a developmental trait rather than genetic. It is related to the process of domestication and tameness in canines.



No, we lived in social groups(societies) long before the world was overpopulated. Like millions of years? In any case, the oldest discovered temple is ~12000 years old featuring engravings of animals on erected stones. It takes a labour specialized society to do stuff like that. They had enough abundance to spare workers for a esoteric task with no immediate gain. THAT is a society by any measure.

There are likely older sites still buried.



Someday an earthquake could release ancient buried virii or bacteria that would wipe us all out. We have no edge over tiny organisms.

Intelligent animals would be an interesting experiment, however more evolutionary adaptations might be necessary for them to make a civilization or something. Although I guess you could kinda consider anthills or beehives civilizations. I wonder how intelligent ants and bees are?

For thousands of years, there have been some humans who were thought by the majority to be devoid of intelligence because they lacked the ability to communicate. Only recently have we developed the knowledge and technology to enable some of these people to communicate with us- and we've discovered that they have so much to share with us. How many great minds have lived and died in obscurity because we were too ignorant to speak their language?
We're learning more and more about the intelligence of animals, too- sometimes by teaching them to speak our language, sometimes by learning theirs. We've got a long way to go before we really understand the intelligence of animals- and humans.

The trouble with being an etymologist is that people keep bringing you bugs to look at.

That's funny... I get the same thing, and I'm a pogrommer - Josef Stalin

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Sorry... it just sprung into my head - it must have been a virus - Lau.

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PS. And another bug strikes: this was intended to be a PM to legendoftheselkie, complimenting her on her signature, but I hit the wrong button.

You should be able to do that in a few hundred thousand years. Think of how many generations would be required. And the only likely animals that could be bred to high intelligence are the primates and cetecians both of which have long lives and take a long time to reach sexual maturity.

ruveyn

Yes, it is likely that length of sexual immaturity and childhood is directly proportional to intelligence.

I wonder what do you mean by "human intelligence". The word intelligence has never been properly defined and the thing is that all the activities that humans do that makes us seem intelligent are already there in animals: animals have ideas, animals have memory, animals can count, animals have emotions, complex psychologies, even mental conditions.

The vast majority of humans go their entire lives without ever making an original scientific discovery. Think about that.

I propose that there's no such thing as "human intelligence". If a human spent his entire life alone in the jungle he would die knowing just as much about the world as the next animal.

What sets us apart is complex language. Thanks to spoken languages we started building up our knowledge. Ever since language appeared things are only discovered once and then passed on thru the generations.

Give animals the ability to communicate ideas to each other and they will get to the moon... eventually, no other change required.

In order to communicate ideas meaning abstraction one must have them in the first place. Now how does one breed animals capable of highly general abstraction? At this moment in time no one really knows just why humans are as smart as they are. I think it is the result of a glitch or a crap shoot.

ruveyn

Breeding humans for human intelligence. Now that would be something worth doing.

cackle!

Merle

Of course it would in theory be possible - if human intelligence evolved from more primitive ape intelligence, then an equivalent intelligence could be evolved (or selected by breeding) in the same way.

The question is whether humans are intelligent enough to carry out the successful breeding programme (over undoubtedly thousands or millions of years). It might not be as simple as simply selecting for certain 'smart' traits, and other attributes might be more important. If we were able to do it however, we shouldn't expect that the final animal resembles anything like the original animal with extra intelligence - probably there would be huge physical and developmental changes which came along with the changes in intellect.

Aren't some domesticated species somewhere already down the road in the process of producing the smartest stock possible for the breed? You can't breed intelligence faster than the breed can evolve it's own intelligence. If you want to talk about cloning human traits into animals, well, that's totally different than just breeding the best with the best. Doi.

If you mean that we have successfully bred, say sheepdogs, for intelligence, then I guess the answer is "yes".


Erm... see above. The whole point of selective breeding is to improve on the rate that the desired traits might occur naturally (if they did so at all).


No. That's exactly what "breeding the best with the best" is all about. If you want to increase a particular trait, you do exactly that. You could wait forever, hoping that it would be selected for, naturally (which probabilistically is certain, given infinite time), or you step in and provide your own selection criteria.

If anyone has any reason for supposing that there is anything in "human intelligence" that is qualitatively different from the intelligence displayed throughout the animal kingdom, I'd be amused to hear what it is.

It was sad when we lost Alex just over a year ago.