Very interesting Slate article
That is about the dumbest article I’ve read this year. Came in just under the wire, didn’t it? I suspect the writer laments that he can’t somehow blame the military industrial complex on the “world’s longest self-serving, ecologically reckless genetic experiment”.
People “invented” cats by selectively raising and breeding the ones that would put up with us and had qualities we liked. We did the same thing with sheep and cattle and pigs and horses.
And plants. Corn is a “biological monstrosity”, as is the banana. We selectively bred almonds with low levels of poisonous liquids. And what we did to apples is insane.
Big news – people breed animals and plants to make them more friendly, useful, and less dangerous. The dog is no more a “Frankencreation” than any of these other things.
Ultimately, we “bred” ourselves. Modern people have slighter bone structure than our wilder ancestors, and I’ll bet we’re less aggressive, too, so we can live in bunches without killing each other.
I thought the unique horror of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was that the not-so-good Doctor used surgery and pseudoscience INSTEAD of good-old-fashioned selective breeding.
To me, the prefix Franken-anything implies a monstrous creation by uniquely soulless modern science and therefore explicitly NOT by old traditional methods. It can’t just mean “altered a lot”, that would debase the perfectly useful meaning of the term.
Sailboat
Dogs do have a wider range of characteristics than most other organisms people have domesticated, though. I don’t see what the objection is. We’ve been conductiong these genetic experiments for years. Now, though we have some idea of what we’re doing. Some of the articles linked to that one, btw, are really yucky.
As over-the-top as the article is, there IS something alarming about the way people have bred health problems into some dog breeds.
Too true. But it could just as easily be argued that the greatest potential evils come not from genetic manipulation per se, but genetic manipulation in the wrong hands, for the wrong reasons. I think the author cast his net a little too wide to really make this point.
Seems a bit over the top, to me. I can’t say that there’s anything wrong in the article, but the conclusions that the author seems to be pushing for are a bit skewed.
F’rinstance, if domesticating the dog was such a bad idea, why is it that the world population of dogs outstrips any other canine species on the planet? From a evolutionary standpoint, one could conclude that the relationship has been beneficial for the dog. (Of course using that same logic, one can say the same thing for cows, sheep, and swine. I’m not sure that proves anything other than Mom Nature can be one Hell of a bitch at times.)
As for the genetic diseases or conditions in various breeds - most of the offenders I am familiar with are usually the result of far too small a breeding population for a given breed at some point in the breed’s history. Usually done for very short-sighted reasons. (Such as the push at one point to breed the Irish Setter just for beauty, and nothing else, leaving us with a dog that can lose an intelligence comparison with a rock.)