I’m saying that by emphasizing desired characteristics, undesired ones get supressed.
Hmm…maybe. If I want a really good herding dog, I may not care so much whether the dog is good around children, or whether it loves to hunt rats, or whether it’s much of a retriever, or whether it likes to swim. I’m not sure why a dog that was good at breeding would necessarily be worse than its ancestors at any of these behaviors. Behavior doesn’t seem to me like a zero-sum game, in which an animal only has a set amount of “points” to spend on different behaviors.
It’s 3d6, not point buy, for the real dorks out there :).
Daniel
Look at the Poms that I mentioned earlier, they were originally bred from Iclandic sled dogs but selective breeding turned them into little poofy lapdogs.
We may just be arguing a semantic point–I’m not sure. But my guess is that when they were breeding the Poms, even though they didn’t particularly desire dogs that hated pulling sleds, sledpulling wasn’t a desired trait for them; nonetheless, I’m guessing that they didn’t seek out the dogs in which the pulling instinct was most suppressed and breed them with one another. Rather, they sought out dogs in which desired characteristics were most expressed, and bred them with one another regardless of whether the traits they didn’t care about were expressed.
But like I said, this may be a purely semantic point.
Daniel
Right. The suppression of traits essentially a side effect.
I think we’re just using different words for the same idea, then.
Daniel
Glad we could clear that up. Now if we could get lissener to realize he’s on the wrong tack. I fear he’s about to be besieged by thespians from several productions of The Wizard of Oz, all wondering where their scarecrows went.