"Can't tame woild rabbit"

...says the girl's father in Watership Down...explaining why she can't keep Hazel (whom she's rescued from her cat), so that he ends up being released at a critical point in the story. Adams put a lot of trouble into researching rabbits for his story, and now I see evidence of why he was right.

According to this story, the genetic code of domestic rabbits (who've been living with humans for 1400 years or so) is different from their wild cousins' in about a hundred places...some of those important for development of behavior.

"Selection during domestication might have focused on tameness and lack of fear," says Pat Heslop-Harrison of the University of Leicester in the UK. "As a farmer, you neither want the animal to hurt you, nor for the animal to die from stress." Keeping lookout and fleeing from potential predators uses up lots of an animal's energy, which humans would rather see turned into meat. Because rabbits were only domesticated relatively recently, the new sequences are not all present in all domestic rabbits. As a result, Andersson says escaped domestic rabbits could revert to wild-like forms over just a few generations - assuming they survived in the wild.
It's unsurprising when you know about the famous Russian fur fox experiment...which took under 50 years to breed the wild foxes into something far more doglike (down to the floppy ears the breeders weren't expecting...they were just looking for tameness). The wiki on domestication gives estimated dates for various creatures that live with us...at least some of that based on genetic evidence.

10 comments:

Ymar Sakar said...

Basically genetics are self modifying every generation based upon environment.

Which means that racial DNA memory isn't so far fetched.

The potential may still be there, but if the environment doesn't activate it, it doesn't happen. But it may happen a few generations later.

This hits directly at the predeterministic ideas of eugenics and DNA mapping or DNA based talent lines. If you don't have a talent for X, you can't succeed at X, right? But then how do you know you lack a talent if you haven't undergone the bone crushing training? They don't know. They don't know what their genes will unlock cause they haven't done the work. Or perhaps the work is generations long, not just for 20 years. So their ancestors were LAZY and that's why they don't got the "talent". Laziness gene passes on for 20 generational lines.

Grim said...

The Russian Fox experiments are a favorite of mine and the wife's. For different reasons: to me, it suggests that the potential to be tame is present as a first actuality. Now nothing can become fully actual without being a potential first; so how did it come to be a potential? Such a useful and interesting trait to find in a wild animal.

Eric Blair said...

File under "Anything can happen."

Yes, the potential is there, but it's a mutation that has to be cultivated or bred for.

Grim said...

That's true, but it's to the side. How surprising that it should be there, ready to activate under the right circumstances.

Joseph W. said...

Look closer at the rabbits article and you may have a partial answer. Tameness is not a single "thing" that is waiting to be turned on like an ignition key, but a set of discreet traits (or even losses of traits) that, in combination, cause a creature to do better in a human environment (and worse in a wild one).

As an example from the article - fearfulness. In any population, not every rabbit is exactly as shy as every other rabbit. But for rabbits, boldness (at least around humans) is part of being tame. It's a survival trait for a domestic rabbit (he won't stress as much around those humans, won't burn as much energy trying to escape, and so will live longer and breed more). Too much boldness around humans is a death sentence for a wild rabbit. (Especially if those humans have vicious kitten-eating dogs.)

So it's not that the rabbits had a little locked-away module labelled "capacity for tameness" that was waiting for humans to activate it...just that a personality trait that averages higher in one environment is under pressure to average lower in another one.

Texan99 said...

Something like the ability that started showing up in H. sapiens about 50K years ago, culminating in the ability about 10K years ago to adopt permanent settlements. It was some kind of accommodation to the threat of living with people who were not very close kin, and especially the ability not to pick up and move --or fight to the death--every time there was a serious quarrel. It's a two-edged trait, which can lead either to peace or to slavery.

Grim said...

The fact that it happens reliably through an incredibly complex mechanism doesn't make it less amazing to me. :) Nor does it alter the philosophical issue underlying the potential/actual distinction. The potential can be thought of as simple for the sake of discussion, but you can also take it as it really is -- a real potential that arises only in the presence of a hugely complex actuality, and which actuality itself gives rise to new potentials.

E Hines said...

There are lots of errors in the DNA molecule; every one of them has the "potential" to be useful or deleterious, or meaningless. The only thing that gives effectivity to the potential is evolutionary pressure--which is to say environmental pressure.

If we had a static environment, we'd have a very much slower mutation rate since there'd be no changing forces favoring this error or disfavoring that error.

Eric Hines

Joseph W. said...

Oh, it's amazing all right...in the same way as the heightened intelligence of the Ashkenazi Jews (and developed over a similar timeframe, and very broadly for similar reasons -- as an adaptation to a new and "captive" environment).

Now we just need to learn to cheat the centuries and insert such qualities faster...

Ymar Sakar said...

Basically welfare and slave populations breed human DNA to be perfect slaves. Although it's not impossible there afterwards to reverse the DNA coding, since the baseline was never wiped out. Eugenics does think that DNA coding can be remapped permanently. They couldn't do it in the open so people like Sanger did it secretly via abortion ala women's "choice".

The real choice wasn't with the animals being bred, but with the humans controlling the experiment.

This goes back to the heart of 1850s Democrat plantation beliefs about women and slaves knowing their place. There is no place, so to speak, for human DNA, only certain specializations that come from prior training. What can be trained for, can be trained out of. But it's not the socio political economic cultural matrix, like in the Middle East. Each individual can be de-trained if you remove the external influences. So if you can't remove the external influences, the individual can still be used to breed out certain unwanted traits.

Which is what the Left is doing with welfare when they couldn't transform entirely American culture. It's locked in by generational culture, generational breeding, and individual desires. These are the Threefold Locks. There are probably more in development.