If people wanted to and had much time (hundreds/thousands of years) could they ‘breed’ (for lack of a better term) intelligence into another species?
For example, could selective breeding/genetic manipulation bring about a sentient/intelligent dog or other creature?
A debate over whether it should be done is another question. I would like to know if it is feasible.
or have I read too much David Brin in the past?
I suppose you could select for curiosity and resourcefulness and hope. It all depends on what you mean by intelligent I think.
An with an advanced enough nervous system, sure. Might take hundreds of thousands of generations to selectively breed exceptionally intelligent mammals or birds capable of following multi stage complex tasks. Creating something like a “smart” cockroach is pretty much out of the question, just not enough processing power to work with.
First we would have to discover what intelligence is and how humans acquired it, neither of which we have managed to do.
I would think that canine breeds like Border Collies, usually considered the most intelligent of dogs, would be a start. But you’d have to define intelligence more specifically to determine if the dogs are smarter or just better at following commands.
Well, without a well defined definition of intelligence, it’s hard to say. Would you settle for the ability to learn language?
The genetic mutation (well, one of them, at least) which makes it possible for humans to learn language was recently discovered. This is a mutation of a gene which exists in, if I remember correctly, all mammals. So substituting the human gene for the animal one should be relatively easy. However, there is more to learning a language than just the gene. For most animals, the mode of language is going to be an additional hurdle. For example, dogs are already very good at picking up cues from humans (you can teach a dog that pointing means “look that way” faster than you can a chimp) but they aren’t generally good at vocalizing. Then again, I did have a mutt that was taught to say “I love you”. Most times this came out as a three quick howls, but sometimes it sounded eerily clear, at least as clear as anything Scooby-Doo ever said. More likely it would be neccessary to teach whatever animal this was tested on some sort of sign language, or to use some kind of specialized keyboard like interface.
At this time, we can only wonder what they would say.
I think Grey is right about needing to define intelligence; if you want to selectively breed intelligence you have to first define what traits make up intelligence so you can promote them. Think about how hard it is to define intelligence in humans – I have no idea how you would go about testing something like creativity in dogs.
A while back when I was taking a psych class I read an experiment where selectively breeding rats increased their ability to navigate mazes. However, these rats preformed slower on other tasks. Increasing one intelligence trait (visual-spacial?) may come at the expense of another. So while increasing one trait is certainly possible, intelligence may comprise enough factors that making an animal smarter in general may be impossible.
Also, I think you would eventually run into a dead end using only breeding. The genes need for high intelligence may not exist in the species which leaves either some sort of genetic engineering or waiting for a mutation which would take hundreds of thousands of years.
Of course if you are looking at a time frame of thousands of years, technology will have changed so much that these problems my become insignificant. But I would not expect to see in super-chimps in the near future.
I can’t really define ‘intelligent/self-aware’ specifically (but I know it when I see it 
)
Without much thought, I was thinking of a program that attempted to increase brain mass. Each generation would be given an ‘IQ test’ (whatever that would be) and only those would be allowed to breed.
I would think that physical limitations (i.e. could a female dog give birth to puppies with a higher brain mass?) or genetic limitations (once you started, how would you prevent severe inbreeding?) would be a problem. Would they?
I didn’t know we could splice a human ‘language gene’ into other mammals. Hmmmmm…interesting!
Joshmaker’s rat fact may be a dash of cold water though.
Looks like my army of intelligent rats to take over the world idea might not work out.
But all you are doing is breeding animals that do better at your IQ test. How you create that test determines what you get out the other side (if what you want is physically possible). If you want chickens that can play Tic-Tac-Toe, I bet you’d succeed. If you want a slug that can improvize jazz piano I think you’ll have a long wait.
That rat experiment is interesting, but as with just about all rat experiments, extrapolation into other species is largely guesswork. Breeding rats for “intelligence” may involve trade-offs, but we know that intelligent humans tend to breed other intelligent humans, with “intelligence” here defined in a very broad, “Hey, that guy’s smart!” sorta way. While these smarter people may lack in other places (maybe they can’t dance well, or something), they are typically viewed as being overall smarter than normal, in some general, well-rounded, nebulous sort of way. Basically, I’m trying to say in as long a winded way as possible that in humans, at least, selecting for intelligence doesn’t seem to have any tangible drawbacks.
So one question, then, would be: are dogs (or whatever creature we’re trying to breed into a brainiac) more like humans in this respect, or more like rats.
Of course, this could be something universal that we just don’t notice in humans, because the drawbacks are in things we don’t really care about. Maybe “smarter” humans are worse at typing. Whatever it is, it can’t be too significant to survival, because it’s pretty much a given that humans have been bred for intelligence, via natural selection. If there were trade-offs involved, they were in areas that didn’t hamper our ability to survive. So maybe our super-smart doggie friencs would be lousy hunters, or have poor sense of smell, or worse vision. Or maybe they’d be harder to toilet train, I dunno.
Sounds like fun, at any rate. Maybe in ten thousand years we can finally breed a dog that knows that chewing on electrical cords is a bad idea.
Jeff
I think it would be a hell of a thing to do to another critter…
One major difference between humans any all other animals is that the human brain does most of its maturing after birth. This not only gives the brain a chance to select for those traits and skills that are most useful, it allows us to have physically larger brains. (Anyone who’s given birth knows it would be impossible for us to have larger brains at birth and for mothers to still be able to walk.) Human babies are born at a stage that in most other creatures would be considered premature. Even relatively helpless kittens and puppies are able to do more in a few weeks than a human child can do in a year. This is by way of saying we’d first have to find a way to breed this neotany into any creature we hoped to make more intellectually gifted.
On the other hand, if dogs could think about these things, they’d probably wonder how we managed to enjoy life – or function at all – with such a poor sense of smell. Gazelles would think us so slow as to be crippled. Ooops. I meant “motility-challenged.”
Tourbot has got at least part of the answer; our language abilities are the most exclusive part of our makeup, and seem to be at least partly genetic in origin;
the intelligence that we appear to have is mostly connected to this additional language ability; like a song bird, we put a lot of effort into language, syntax and verbal display;
no doubt this display ability and the social grooming that goes with it have a lot to do with mating and bonding between members of our society.
personally I tend to think that unaugmented mammals have a great deal of natural intelligence, and integrating the language abilty into their genome would allow them to become self aware in a similar way to humans.
I have no doubt the addition of human language abilities would allow a closely related specieslike the Bonobo to become self-aware, although the resultant genetic splice may express itself in a very different way to human beings.
(this was the basis of my essay about Neobonobos, heavilyinfluenced by
But any geneticist would tell you that this
Blink!!! ----
(this was the basis of my essay about Neobonobos, heavilyinfluenced by David Brin and Brian Stableford)
But any geneticist would tell you that this is mostly fantasy, with a slim chance of working as described. Eventually I have no doubt something similar will come about, but the moral questions it raises are not required by the OP.
http://www.orionsarm.com/clades/NeoChimps.html
Considering how annoying the “dumb” ones are, I would consider that a good thing.
Well, we haven’t done too good a job on breeding it for ourselves up to this point, so I don’t fancy our chances with other species.