[HN Gopher] Dog ejected from car during Sunday crash found on sh...
___________________________________________________________________
Dog ejected from car during Sunday crash found on sheep farm,
herding sheep
Author : MaysonL
Score : 204 points
Date : 2021-06-10 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.khq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.khq.com)
| Ccecil wrote:
| It always surprises me when I see my local news on HN...this
| happened within 2 miles of my shop.
|
| Glad to see they found the dog :)
| duxup wrote:
| I grew up with a friend who had some horses and cattle.
|
| Their cutting horse (used to manage cattle) had an incredible
| motivation to do it job, all the time, and maybe a bit too much.
| More than once we'd look out from their living room window only
| to see the cattle racing across field (not a common thing) and
| the cutting horse (who had escaped from another field) happily
| chasing after them. Or everyone wondering where the cattle were,
| only to find the cutting horse had them all gathered up at the
| corner of a field.
|
| Poor cows seemed pretty tired of that horse's antics.
| mywacaday wrote:
| My neighbor had a dog for herding 200+ cows in for milking
| morning and evening, they had to sell him because he kept
| bringing.in the cows when he could slip away from the farmer,
| they couldn't get him to stop, instinct is a powerful thing.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Overachiever. Give that dog a heard of 20,000 cattle.
| majormunky wrote:
| Huh, this happened about a mile from my house.
| Ccecil wrote:
| Hello....fellow Kootenai county resident :)
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Are you missing any sheep?
| vijaybritto wrote:
| What a feel good story! I'm glad he's safe and still grinding!
| jb1991 wrote:
| Off topic but since it affects this article and several are
| posting archive.org links, I just find this kind of error message
| ridiculous:
|
| > 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons > We recognize you are
| attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the
| European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the
| General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access
| cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact
| q6news@khq.com or call 509-448-6000.
|
| I mean really, what is the big deal about allowing a no-cookie
| visit?
| durnygbur wrote:
| They'd rather sell their children to ISIS than serve a plain
| HTML with no ads. Monetization on the web is no joke.
| ddek wrote:
| Herding dogs are like that.
|
| When I was about 5, we took our 1yo Bernese Mountain into a field
| with grazing cattle. Being young and boisterous, and of a cattle
| herding breed, he naturally rounded them up fairly quickly.
|
| Cows are smart though. The next time we were in the field, the
| same cows split up and rounded _him_ into a corner.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| What does it mean for a dog to be herding sheep without a human
| indicating what to do?
| malkia wrote:
| Our dog often "sheep"-herds us - when we are walking - often
| going around us, trying to put us in a "circle". He's a shih-poo
| dog rescue (or that's what we've been told). When one of us goes
| astray, he stops and checks that we are all in form :) - lol
| LightG wrote:
| Next step: cat videos and I'm here for it.
|
| Can I haz the HN cat videos?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Sure. I'll fire up a bash shell and type a few commands for
| you...
| jonplackett wrote:
| We had a collie (sheep dog) when I was a kid.
|
| The first time I took it out as a puppy, I threw a ball, and it
| ran around to the other side in a big arc and lay down looking at
| it.
|
| I shouted "get it" and it ran in and grabbed it.
|
| Herding behaviour is just baked right in there now!
| adwww wrote:
| My cousins had collies as working dogs.
|
| I spent lots of time with the dogs whenever I visited. My
| favourite was watching them herd rabbits for fun when we went
| for walks - working as a team to flush them out of hedgerows
| and then chase them around for a bit.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| In case you are in Europe, and would like to read the article -
| the internet archive got you covered:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210610163014/https://www.khq.c...
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Has anyone else noticed that local news websites never put their
| location in a prominent place on the page? This one includes a
| Washington address in the footer, which I guess is at least
| within one state of the event? Half the time there is zero
| indication of where the station is in the country... or even the
| world, although US/Canada/UK/Australia is usually more obvious
| from context.
| asimjalis wrote:
| This is a problem. I noticed that it mentioned Spokane in the
| weather panel on the right. They know where they are. So it is
| easy to assume that everyone else does as well.
|
| Most people (myself included) find it hard to appreciate that
| anything online is accessible from anywhere in the world. I
| still find it spooky that I can buy on Amazon or get rides on
| Uber in Iceland and in the UK.
| acje wrote:
| Ny uncle once had a large male Border-collie that went missing
| while he was working in his forest. The dog came back later in
| the afternoon herding a moose.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| It blows me away that people can see things like this and still
| deny any genetic basis for certain cognitive features in humans.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Have humans been bred for hundreds of generations for extremely
| specific tasks? No? Then there is no reason to assume
| differential cognitive features in humans. Humans have by and
| large evolved in extremely similar cognitive environments where
| the most complex cognitive tasks were associated to social
| functions and as far as we can tell these are extremely similar
| for 99% of human evolutionary history across all groups.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| It's impossible that cross-cultural variations in societal
| structure or environment imparted a selection bias acting
| upon certain cognitive traits that would explain the observed
| disparities we see in modern data?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Which ones? For the vast majority of human history societal
| structures were incredibly similar. And you can observe any
| societal structure in any general geographic area, more or
| less, controlling for very low population densities. So no,
| I don't see it.
|
| Similarly, I don't see what kinds of environmental factors
| would have a huge impact of cognitive load. For the vast
| majority of human history they are staggeringly similar and
| less of a factor than social structure.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| You don't need hundreds of thousands of years to have
| meaningful shifts in allelic distribution. 10,000 years
| of agriculture is more than enough to select for height,
| lactase persistence, and more [1]. I don't think it's a
| far shot to conjecture a relationship between certain
| modes of civilization and cognitive features that they
| select for. I can't point to conclusive empirical
| evidence for this but my problem is just with people
| making the study of these issues taboo and denying the
| scientific possibility.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/1511232
| 02631.h...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I'm not making these issues taboo. You claim that
| agriculture selected for height, yet height amongst
| humans was of almost identical height except for a few
| outliers.
|
| What the study you linked showed was a change in around
| 12 genes across 10 000 years of agriculture that were
| _all_ related to diet or sunlight exposure. This was
| because they moved to an environment that forced a
| completely different diet.
|
| However we know that for 10 000 years we could notice
| almost every kind of societal organization in most
| geographical regions, from hunter-gatherer societies, to
| agricultural societies, to urban societies, etc...
|
| From Africa, to Asia, to India, to the Americas, every
| single one of these societal structures were observed,
| and in almost every case the optimal predictor of the
| presence of these structures were economic and political,
| not genetic or of ancestry.
|
| So again, that leads me to the question I formulated
| above, which populations that you're thinking about did
| not organize in which societal mode? What hypothesis do
| you have linking which organizational mode to which
| population leading to which expected cognitive effect? I
| honestly, really cannot find anything. If you could find
| something, a study could be made, just like the one you
| cited above, trying to find the genetic changes as
| populations transitioned societal modes or between
| populations in similar environments but different
| societal modes (the last are fairly rare just off the top
| of my head).
|
| There just isn't enough to make a solid hypothesis here.
| If you can make one that's worthwhile I'm all ears, but
| there just isn't anything to draw on.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > It's impossible ... ?
|
| That's our standard? Anything beyond the impossible? This
| is gonna be a wide-ranging discussion.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Humans haven't had multiple generations of selective breeding
| to select for particular cognitive traits. We have, however,
| had:
|
| * Sunburn / vitamin D deficiency
|
| * Oxygen deprivation at high altitudes
|
| * Free diving
|
| which have had obvious effects on certain human populations.
| But mentally, we're all pretty much _just human_ , same as any
| other; variation is massive, yes, but it can be pretty big
| _between siblings_. Seeing "sheep dog breeds have a herding
| instinct" doesn 't tell you much about humans.
|
| When people try to argue a "genetic basis" for a particular
| trait, they're usually just trying to justify racism.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| > Oxygen deprivation at high altitudes
|
| This is actually three examples in one. Tibetans, Andeans,
| and Ethiopians each have their own unique version of this
| adaptation.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Same with the skin tone one; skin tone tells you (roughly)
| the latitude where a population was recently, but (as
| adaptions go) a population's skin tone changes pretty
| quickly.
| newfriend wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Different populations of humans vary wildly by almost every
| physical trait, such as height, build, bone structure, skin,
| hair type, eye color, muscle fiber.
|
| But when it comes to the brain, we are all exactly the same.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Muscle fiber variations across humans are pretty small.
| They're really only very noticeable as far as the extremes,
| or in quite small populations.
|
| Similarly, hair types are barely different. But to tell you
| a story, the village my ancestors lived in for centuries
| had people with smooth blond hair and people like me with
| extremely stiff black hair. Same for eye color. Anyways, I
| digress, these are generally single-gene variations which
| is why you will find most of the variation in most
| populations.
|
| Height and build is an interesting one. For most of history
| heights were very similar across populations. Actually, the
| only exception we know of were Anglo-Saxon settlers, and
| some peoples in South-East Asia.
|
| This suggests that people even in extremely remote places
| had incredibly similar evolutionary pressures that led to
| almost identical heights. But nowadays, the specificities
| of the impact on a changing diet are different [https://www
| .tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20780389.2012.65...].
|
| Skin is really the biggest one, because Vitamin-D
| deficiency and skin cancer are huge evolutionary pressures.
| But as we've seen, otherwise it's pretty clear humans
| evolved in broadly similar environments and found very
| similar tradeoffs. This is especially true for intelligence
| where the biggest load for intelligence was social
| interactions, and where social structures are very similar.
| kokanator wrote:
| I know people don't want to admit to genetic impacts on
| cognition but there have been pressures over many generations
| for these traits and those pressures have been different all
| over the world.
|
| Take the example of a genetic lineage living in a jungle
| where it is necessary to know the difference, availability,
| dietary qualities, medicinal aspects of thousands of plants.
| Not to mention predatory dangers, snake dangers,
| environmental dangers, etc.
|
| In this case, the individual with high aptitudes for
| memorization, categorization and pattern matching would
| survive at a substantially higher rate than those with lower
| aptitudes. Remember, a small band does not have the resources
| to support low producing members so they would not be
| artificially perpetuated.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| No; the individual with high aptitudes for memorisation,
| categorisation and pattern-matching would become the local
| healing expert, likely apprenticed to whoever was best at
| it before. Everyone else would focus primarily on the
| predatory and environmental dangers, plus their own
| specialisms (and, you know, everything else).
|
| Remember: we live in a society. So did our ancestors.
| Intelligence is a pretty general skill; all sorts of
| different selection pressures push it up, not least of all
| _interpersonal politics_ ; in a band of well-to-do humans
| who have elders, long-term survival is probably common
| enough that the dating scene has a higher impact on
| reproductive fitness than raw survival skill.
| kokanator wrote:
| >in a band of well-to-do humans...
|
| Very sincere question.
|
| From my understanding, most bands were not well to do and
| specialization wasn't so common until recent history (
| agrarian ages ). So in these instances wouldn't cognitive
| abilities be more generally valuable?
|
| Also, if you were a gathering type and needed to survive
| for a week away from your group the cognitive skills to
| recognize resources, weather, threats, etc as well as
| navigate back to your group would require a certain
| aptitude. Those without the aptitude would simply not
| return. Correct?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _From my understanding, most bands were not well to do
| and specialization wasn 't so common until recent history
| ( agrarian ages )._
|
| I don't know about _ages_ , but in recent non-agrarian
| _cultures_ (e.g. Buffalo-hunters in North America) there
| were often medical specialists. But if we 're getting
| pedantic, _individualism_ would also have been a lot
| lower; people tend to look out for each other when they
| live together. Your "memorisation skills improve
| survival" argument doesn 't work all that well when the
| memorisation required is well within the ability of
| almost all modern humans, if that's what their lives are
| centred around. (How many pieces of trivia does the
| average person know about celebrities? And that's not
| even deliberately-learnt knowledge.)
|
| > _Those without the aptitude would simply not return.
| Correct?_
|
| Those without the aptitude wouldn't go on such an
| expedition in the first place, if they had any sense in
| them.
|
| You're trying hard to think of hypothetical scenarios
| where your hypothesis is _true_ , and not hypothetical
| scenarios where your hypothesis is _false_. If I get to
| come up with loads of situations where my theory is true,
| I can justify _any_ theory to myself. That 's why
| scientists care so much about falsification.
| kokanator wrote:
| I get what you are saying. So let's start with the
| hypothesis then. We must ask a question first to begin to
| create tests ( thought experiments in this case ).
|
| "Environment and/or society ( which is part of your
| environment ) apply selective pressures favoring
| cognitive abilities. These selections produce increased
| cognition in decedents indicating genetic influence in
| cognitive abilities."
|
| Human cognition has not remained stagnant over time. It
| has evolved. This evolution of cognition was driven by
| selective forces regardless of those forces being social
| or environmental or combination thereof. It is important
| to not confuse technology with our ability to think.
| However, there is a point where cognition allows for the
| advancement of knowledge and technology. Somehow we
| reached that point.
|
| To assume that once we reached this point, human
| cognition stopped evolving would be more elective than
| attempting to explore hypothetical situations as applied
| to our understandings of past peoples to help analyze the
| question.
|
| We know that we can force selection for intelligence in
| other mammals [0]( dogs in this thread ). We also know
| there are significant indications of intelligence related
| to genetics in humans [1]. ( the wikipedia names a number
| of caveats, however there remains significant evidence
| that a portion of intelligence is determined genetically
| ).
|
| The fact that societies advance to where the selective
| pressure for cognitive abilities reduces is recognized
| and not part of this argument. The argument is
| specifically regarding the selection for intelligence. It
| is also understood that IQ can be increased through
| training and society.[2]
|
| [0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA555235.pdf [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _To assume that once we reached this point, human
| cognition stopped evolving would be more elective than
| attempting to explore hypothetical situations as applied
| to our understandings of past peoples to help analyze the
| question._
|
| Evolution doesn't work that way. My criticism was with
| your assumption that such selection would differ markedly
| between populations.
|
| Also, IQ is not a suitable proxy for intelligence, if you
| want to make the conclusions you're making. It's an
| aggregate metric that takes into account things that
| aren't intelligence (e.g. certain aspects of culture);
| how do you know you're not detecting heritability of
| _those_? Any study that starts at IQ and ends with new
| conclusions about intelligence is probably wrong.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Is there evidence to support this, or is it just Internet
| speculation? For example, do we know what traits would
| favor someone in a jungle? Have you lived in a jungle or
| researched the question?
|
| Do we know how evolution works? One thing I believe I
| understand is that evolution takes far longer than people
| imagine. A few centuries is nothing. Humans have been in
| their current evolutionary form for around 200,000 years.
| Adaptations are not evolution, and our genetics change and
| adapt during our lifetimes. My children will not be
| genetically better at typing than the original homo
| sapiens. Think of that: You are not genetically smarter
| than humans of 200,000 years ago; someone then is just as
| able to be a scientist as you are. All of our advantages
| are from other factors.
|
| Another thing I've learned is that claims need evidence;
| that's what separates the wheat from the infinite chaff,
| the science from the witchcraft. The parent comment would
| require evidence to qualify for even a high school essay.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/FY96u
| aerovistae wrote:
| Feels very strange to see this article on hacker news at all, let
| alone at the top. Not saying it shouldn't be here -- generally I
| feel anything that people here find interesting should be here --
| but rather that I'm surprised people here find this interesting.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I recently started to watch youtube videos of painting
| restoration and cow hoof trimming.
|
| I cannot draw a straight line and was never close to a cow but
| somehow I find it interesting to watch what others do (when
| they are passionate about this) and you learn plenty of things.
|
| This is to say that what people find interesting is sometimes
| surprising (I am also a huge fan of French Middle Age
| sociology, not sure why after years of reading about the
| subject)
| drubio wrote:
| I found it more interesting that while the story focuses on the
| positives of social media -- even the dog owner says so in the
| interview. The HN comments are mostly on dog instincts,
| genetics and breeding.
|
| It looks like the story got upvoted for other interesting
| reasons and not the original intent as a feel good social media
| story.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| No onboarding necessary!
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Living his best life man
| dusted wrote:
| Oh! My first "451: Unavailable due to legal reasons" I love the
| future.
| himinlomax wrote:
| It's infuriating and so disingenuous to say it is unavailable
| for "legal reason". It's unavailable because the website does
| not want to respect their users' privacy is what it is.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons in Europe.
| stanfordkid wrote:
| This is kind of a weird article to make frontpage of HN
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Watching the story, they mention that social media is how the
| farm-owner discovered the dog that was bothering his sheep was
| the missing dog from the crash-story and was able to find the
| owners.
|
| This could have happened without social media, but it was a
| significant facilitator in getting all parties in contact with
| each other.
| onychomys wrote:
| Who among us hasn't dreamed of deleting the IDEs from our
| computers and going off to be a shepherd? This dog is living
| the life we all wish we had.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| nah, our instinct to herding bugs and new features is too
| strong.
| a3n wrote:
| Or a lumberjack. In the forests of British Columbia.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| It is. I mean don't get me wrong, I got a sensible chuckle out
| of it. But this isn't really technology related in any way,
| unless the dog has a startup we don't know about.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| It's a sheep herding startup
| ethanbond wrote:
| Dogs themselves are very much a technology for humans. As
| evidenced by their "instinct" to do useful things for us like
| herding!
|
| Certainly stretching a bit, but the article is an interesting
| commentary on one of our most primitive technologies. (Or you
| can consider the selective breeding process itself to be the
| technology powering this)
| throwaw29125432 wrote:
| So its a Dang Dog! (herds sheep like Dang herds us!)
| endlessvoid94 wrote:
| Maybe HN is being footprinted
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If
| a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious
| comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please
| don't also comment that you did.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| milesvp wrote:
| I'd be worried if it happened more often. But it's not totally
| out of character historically for HN.
|
| I'd say this is sort of interesting. I don't know my dog breeds
| but my first thought was this dog must have some sheep dog
| heritage. I'm amazed looking at my children how many of their
| thought processes, how their brains are wired, seem to be
| genetically inherited. And, like what kind of work would my
| daughter naturally gravitate towards if she was ejected from a
| car crash at an equivalent age of this dog...
| ekimekim wrote:
| > my first thought was this dog must have some sheep dog
| heritage
|
| The article says it's a Border Collie, which is an extremely
| smart, extremely capable sheepdog. My family had border
| collies and with zero training or interaction with other dogs
| from which they could've learned the behaviour, they'd
| naturally try to round us up.
| SN76477 wrote:
| doggos gonna doggo
| u801e wrote:
| Was the dog ejected because it was not in a crate that was
| properly secured in the vehicle? I've seen so many people driving
| with their pets freely roaming around in the vehicle.
| Ccecil wrote:
| It was in the back of a pickup IIRC. Quite common around the
| area.
| kokanator wrote:
| This is a sincere issue. Most dogs are not fit or trained to
| ride unsecured in a vehicle.
|
| The one exception I have found for this are cattle dogs in the
| American west who are basically raised and live on the back of
| a truck. These trucks often don't every leave the dirt road.
|
| Dogs which are not secured will be injured, injure a passenger
| or both during a collision. Ever see a dead dog on a freeway?
| Most of them have jumped out of a truck or car window.
| dmurray wrote:
| I bet it wasn't wearing a crash helmet, either. I've seen so
| many people driving without one.
| ddalex wrote:
| if you have an unsecured dog in the car, definitely you need
| a helmet cause that dog will become a projectile in any
| serious accident
| macintux wrote:
| We have seatbelts and airbags. Dogs have their spines.
|
| I recall a fellow who built what were effectively
| "wheelchairs" for his dachshunds after he was in an accident
| and their backs were broken, leaving them paraplegics.
| enriquto wrote:
| > We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a
| country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including
| the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation
| (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For
| any issues, contact q6news@khq.com or call 509-448-6000.
|
| Why do they do that? It seems to be a news website, which holds
| read-only content. Readers are not "users", I don't see how the
| GDPR can apply here.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Has anyone tried calling them?
| enriquto wrote:
| it doesn't say the country, must be haiti? (509 prefix)
| jjulius wrote:
| 509 is the area code for eastern Washington state.
| jraph wrote:
| Yeah, seriously. "We recognize that we want to be tracking the
| hell out of you and unfortunately you live in a regulated area
| where there are laws somewhat trying to protect you."
|
| Anyway, fellow European netizens, you can read this here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210610163014/https://www.khq.c...
| [deleted]
| PaulAJ wrote:
| This can be a serious problem. Border collies (this dog was a
| border-collie cross) are bred for sheep herding. However an out-
| of-control dog doing its herding thang can cause a flock to
| squeeze so tight for so long that sheep die of stress, heat or
| exhaustion.
| ot wrote:
| It's always mindblowing to me that we've been able to encode such
| complex behaviors into instincts just by selective breeding over
| a few hundred generations.
|
| Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
| sambroner wrote:
| Seriously... there's nature vs nurture, but the nature of this
| dog is clearly to herd sheep.
| LanceH wrote:
| I believe the herding instinct was already there for the
| purpose of hunting. The hunting and kill has been bred out of
| them and the herding/separating remains.
| PaulAJ wrote:
| Actually its been bred out with extreme prejudice. Any
| sheepdog that bites a sheep gets shot. No second chances.
| Its a part of the job that shepherds absolutely hate
| because these dogs are really close and highly valued
| family members. But its the only way.
| alistairSH wrote:
| *But its the only way."
|
| Are these dogs unsuitable as pets (for non-farming
| households)?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Sometimes. Border collies will happily herd your children
| if no sheep are available. You wouldn't want one that had
| bitten a sheep.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Are these dogs unsuitable as pets (for non-farming
| households)?
|
| Does the household have any toddlers to herd?
|
| Working dogs that are not elderly to the point where they
| prefer to sit on their butts all day generally make
| terrible pets. Ones that are bred to herd animals and
| have been kicked out for biting them even more so.
| Goronmon wrote:
| Why is killing the dog necessary, rather than just
| spay/neuter and then letting it do something other than
| herd sheep?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The dog would need to leave the farm, and couldn't go to
| another farm or a home with children. That mostly leaves
| rescues as the option, and they often don't have much
| space, and the farmer or rancher may not be able to
| safely pen the dog until such space can be found or may
| not be able to afford feeding more dogs than needed to
| operate.
| [deleted]
| kache_ wrote:
| We're doing it to ourselves too.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Software engineer ejected from self driving car during Sunday
| crash found in server farm, herding sheep?
| zoomablemind wrote:
| ...browsing HN, as if nothing happened. Tons of good stuff,
| need to know!
| Xpletivedeleted wrote:
| ... found in server room, dreaming of electric sheep?
| meowface wrote:
| *cats
| catherd wrote:
| Exited self-driving car project to make hardware _and_
| herd cats, which turns out to be the same thing.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| Patching software.
| xbar wrote:
| Failing to write documentation.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Not via selective breeding. At least, not very successfully;
| there have been attempts, but fortunately most eugenicists
| let their "I wanna hurt the Inferior People(tm) - err, Not-
| People(tm)" rule over actually doing eugenics properly, so we
| merely got atrocities. And even if they had, you can't get
| much eugenics done in a handful of generations; I'm not aware
| of any eugenics campaign longer than ten generations, and
| even the longest of those are mostly just slow-motion
| genocides.
|
| In fact, we've mostly neutered evolutionary pressures on
| ourselves. In ten thousand years, this might be a minor
| problem, but we'll probably have figured out a way of doing
| genetic modification without being monsters by then.
| praptak wrote:
| Getting mauled by a wild animal isn't the only kind of
| evolutionary pressure. As long as you die without having
| offspring, the pressure got you.
| wyager wrote:
| > Not via selective breeding
|
| Yes via selective breeding. Look into Landian analysis of
| urban centers as "IQ shredders". Cities attract the
| smartest people and then tank their birth rate.
|
| > we've mostly neutered evolutionary pressures on
| ourselves. In ten thousand years, this might be a minor
| problem
|
| It's going to be a problem much sooner than that. Look into
| Yudkowsky's analysis of evolutionary error correction
| bandwidth.
| krapht wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the future is going to look more like
| Gattaca than Idiocracy. I wouldn't bet against genetic
| engineering.
| wyager wrote:
| This is one possible way of artificially boosting error
| correction capacity. I hope you are right.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Cities attract the smartest people and then tank their
| birth rate._
|
| That's pretty simplified - but even if it wasn't, we're
| not going to run out of "clever genes" because it's not
| as simple as that. (But even if it were, the selection
| isn't strong enough for that to happen.)
|
| > _It's going to be a problem much sooner than that._
|
| If our artificial selection pressures remain the same.
| Which they won't. Two hundred years ago, our society's
| "artificial selection" was completely different; in two
| hundred years, it'll be completely different again.
| wyager wrote:
| > the selection isn't strong enough for that to happen
|
| Your model is busted - the Flynn effect has already
| reversed and intelligence is decreasing again.
|
| You're right that it's "not as simple" as my one-sentence
| summary but my claim is directionally correct.
|
| > it'll be completely different again
|
| The risk has nothing to do with what the concrete
| pressures are, but how much error correction bandwidth we
| have vs background mutation load rate.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| It's far from a conclusion that the Flynn effect has
| certainly reversed, for what it's worth. The 2018 study
| most often cited is on a small group of military aptitude
| tests from families in Norway and hasn't been replicated
| since.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Your model is busted - the Flynn effect has already
| reversed and intelligence is decreasing again._
|
| Which metric are we using to measure intelligence this
| time? How do you know it gives meaningful results for
| what you're trying to use it to measure? (Please don't
| say IQ.) And has the study been replicated?
|
| > _The risk has nothing to do with what the concrete
| pressures are, but how much error correction bandwidth we
| have vs background mutation load rate._
|
| But the selection effects you've described are all
| _local_ and _weak_. Worst-case scenario - _absolute_
| worst-case scenario - the city Americans marry rural
| Africans and the problem goes away. But it won 't get to
| that point.
|
| Eliezer Yudkowsky knows a lot about philosophy of
| thought, and AI theory, but he hasn't put as much effort
| into learning about genetics. If the average geneticist
| isn't worried, chances are that he's made a mistake in
| his reasoning (or that you're misunderstood his concerns)
| - and I haven't heard anybody in a biological field
| worrying about this.
|
| ---
|
| Wait, are you talking about his "in the absence of
| selection pressure, we'll get mutations that aren't
| filtered out"? If so... that's a hundreds of generations
| kind of problem, and I'm confident that stuff like IVF
| embryo selection (selecting against the genes for known
| genetic conditions) is already counteracting that effect.
| (Yes, this is technically eugenics, yes it could get
| dystopian if we're not careful, no it doesn't justify
| what the word "eugenics" makes you think of, no I
| shouldn't feel the need to write this parenthetical, yes
| this is the internet we're talking about.)
|
| Transposons are likely to be a bigger issue. I read that
| they've started duplicating themselves more recently, and
| we don't really know why.
|
| But imagine the human genome (for some unidentified
| reason that hasn't happened in the last thousand years)
| starts degrading across the entire world, so we only have
| a hundred years left before no human foetuses are viable.
| We could just GM a human embryo to be the genetic child
| of modern-day humans (whose genome we've already
| sequenced), and we roll-back any mysterious genetic
| problems that far-future humans might develop.
|
| There is an upper bound to how bad things can get, even
| imagining something out of a sci-fi novel, so I am
| _highly_ suspicious of the motives of people who get
| loudly concerned about the "decline of the human genome".
| jerf wrote:
| "In fact, we've mostly neutered evolutionary pressures on
| ourselves."
|
| No, we haven't. We've merely changed them, quite
| significantly. But there's still selection processes
| ongoing.
|
| Since people tend to hear "Racism!" when this sort of thing
| gets said, the pressures I'm discussion includes things
| like being able to survive the civilization's schooling
| system (teen suicides don't have offspring) and the
| different ways of attracting and being a good mate than one
| would pursue in an agrarian or hunter-gather society, such
| as being a visibly wealthy nerd. There's a lot of things
| still affecting and shaping civilization through who has
| how many children with who and how they treat them, and I
| haven't got a personal list of "good" or "bad" such
| effects, because it's not really about "good" or "bad",
| they just _are_ , no matter what labels you put on them.
|
| Another example is the hypothesis that a significant part
| of why "autism" is on the rise is "assortative mating", or,
| to put it another way, that there are evolutionary
| pressures in modern society creating couples who end up
| essentially breeding for traits that, when overexpressed,
| _may_ be called "autism". I'm not making a claim that is
| necessarily _true_ , but it's an example of an evolutionary
| theory applying in the here & now.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| You can't breed humans because you can't isolate or
| consistently provide for an environment for long enough,
| considering how long it takes humans to mature.
|
| Anyone trying to sell you on selective evolution is
| either ignorant or has an ulterior motive. There's a
| reason people tend to hear, "Racism!" when this sort of
| thing gets said -- it's not based at all in science, so
| what else would it be based in?
| jerf wrote:
| I'm not talking about "breeding" humans as a deliberate
| process; I used the term in the passive sense that
| evolution ever "breeds" anything. I'm saying, evolution
| is still functioning. Who has children and what happens
| to those children is not uniform simply because some
| illnesses that used to kill us are now survivable. That
| was never the only effect on our evolution anyhow, merely
| a particularly visible one. Many other effects are still
| in play. It's a myth that evolution has been shut down
| just because one particular mechanism has been partially
| blunted. Certainly the net effect has been a population
| explosion of late, but that's still only on a short
| evolutionary time frame (and we kinda already _know_ that
| it can 't continue much longer, re: climate change and
| such), but that doesn't mean every fertilized egg is
| surviving completely undifferentiated from any other, nor
| that there are any other selection processes in play.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _We 've merely changed them, quite significantly. But
| there's still selection processes ongoing._
|
| Hence "mostly". But evolution requires large time-scales
| to function; selection for arbitrarily-fluctuating
| criteria is practically no selection at all.
| Sharlin wrote:
| To a large extent the instincts were already there; we've just
| adapted and selected for various sub-patterns of the ancestral
| pack hunting behavior. Herding livestock is very similar to
| chasing and driving prey to where you want it.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Dogs are very smart. The wild ones, even more so.
|
| Some of us may remember this episode of Sir David
| Attenborough's _Planet Earth_ :
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036vfk
|
| The dogs look like a trained commando squad.
|
| This gives you an idea why _everyone_ on the savannah is
| scared of a Wild Dog pack.
| btilly wrote:
| Per https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-
| facts/mammals/huntin... wild dogs have an astonishing 85%
| success rate in making a kill. However they lose nearly
| half their kills to other predators such as hyenas and
| lions. Even so their chase to meal ratio is still better
| than most predators.
| nradov wrote:
| It helps that dogs have 39 pairs of chromosomes, which is more
| than most other mammals (humans have only 23). So it's
| relatively easy to selectively breed for certain desirable
| phenotypes without getting too many undesirable ones. Although
| the process isn't perfect so we still see a lot of inbreeding
| and genetic diseases in some purebreds.
| onychomys wrote:
| Chromosome number is pretty meaningless. Indian muntjacs have
| just 7 chromosomes (females actually only have 6!), while
| their close cousins on the other side of the Himalayas have
| 46 [0]. Chromosomes are, after all, kind of arbitrary
| divisions of the genome. It's not like all your brain genes
| are on chromosome 1, your liver ones on c2, etc, the genome
| is much more spread out than that.
|
| [0] https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/17/9/1326/994705
| nradov wrote:
| You're missing the point. A higher number of chromosomes
| makes it easier to do targeted selective breeding because
| it's less likely that a desirable characteristic will be on
| the same chromosome as an undesirable characteristic.
| onychomys wrote:
| But linkage is a function of distance from one gene to
| another, so all you really care about is whether your
| desirable gene is physically close to your undesirable
| one. Having things broken up into many chromosomes helps
| only a little bit, if the break happens to be between the
| good and bad genes.
| cjensen wrote:
| During reproduction, chromosomes are "mixed" together
| [1]. You don't get a straight copy of the parent
| chromosome.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_crossover
| zwieback wrote:
| It's in ROM, can't be erased.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The instinct of some dogs to herd is amazing.
|
| One memorable experience I have is working on a farm shoveling
| stuff. As I was working, I suddenly found myself surrounded by
| chickens and chicks. The farm dog had gotten bored and decided it
| was time to round up something.
|
| Some dogs are trained to herd a specific way based on whistles or
| calls. However, the actual instinct to just round up random farm
| animals is mostly just in the nature of some breads.
|
| Probably some sort of hunting evolution, but crazy none the less.
|
| Collies have it bad.
| trapexit wrote:
| One of our border collies comes from a working line; both of her
| parents were working sheepdogs on a farm in Ireland.
|
| We once walked her through a field in Scotland that had a couple
| dozen sheep scattered about. Of course we kept her on a short
| leash and stuck to the public footpath.
|
| Nevertheless, by the time we'd reached the other side of the
| field, she had somehow managed to round up the entire flock.
| Lucasoato wrote:
| > 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
|
| > We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a
| country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including
| the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation
| (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For
| any issues, contact q6news@khq.com or call 509-448-6000.
|
| What about a correct usage of people's data?
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| I really don't think a local news website from Spokane
| Washington can be expected to place international laws as a
| high priority.
|
| Even if they already practiced correct usage of people's data
| (unlikely) having someone on-staff that understands those laws
| enough to communicate the requirements to whoever is developing
| & hosting their IT infrastructure just to get _confirmation_ of
| compliance is enough of an economic deterrent to make the
| landing page you see seem like a more reasonable solution.
| guitarbill wrote:
| And yet they understand the law enough to block EU access? As
| "a local news website from Spokane Washington", why even
| bother? I think some scepticism is valid here.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's a local news station in another country. There are
| undoubtably many local businesses in your country that will not
| do business with me because they don't comply with the legal
| requirements of doing business in my country. Not every company
| is financially able to have global legal compliance.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| I have a high drive Australian Shepherd. When he was 9 months old
| I took him to a sheep farm that trains herding dogs. To see him
| immediately switch from derpy puppy to full on herding mode as
| soon as he saw sheep was pretty amazing.
| pkaye wrote:
| Dog: This is my life meow.
| tyingq wrote:
| Interesting, though a border collie with "no tail" is probably an
| Australian Shepherd.
| kokanator wrote:
| My other career is breeding working dogs.
|
| After observing hundreds of dogs I can tell you breed traits do
| not disappear just because we make the dog a house pet.
|
| Sometimes the traits will remain dormant and simply need to be
| 'unlocked' through exposure the environment/conditions the dog
| was selectively breed for. Thus, when a collie is exposed to a
| herd of sheep, even if it never herded before, it will herd those
| sheep. Once this herding behavior is unlocked the dog will begin
| to herd everything.
|
| This is why we hear stories of dogs which descend from fighting,
| war or defense breed that 'suddenly' become aggressive and
| violent. They are simply expressing all of those generations of
| selective pressure.
|
| Dogs and genetics are truly amazing things.
| odshoifsdhfs wrote:
| I couldn't find a contact email. If you don't mind, would love
| to chat about this. Brunomtsousa at goog-email-service you know
| the one ;)
| anthony_r wrote:
| Cute. But this so much doesn't belong here.
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