science stuff

[bob the r0bot]

came across this article thumbing through national geographic at a book store today and I thought is was interesting enough to share.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/ ... tliff-text

[snipelfritz]

As adorable as a pet fox would be, isn't dog breeding at a point where it really does nothing to benefit the dogs and sacrifices their better health for an arbitrary set of "preferable" aspects? Why would we want to replicate that apart for research? Even then, I think it's relatively obvious that if you breed out all of the survival oriented traits, the animals will have no prospects at survival except for following the, like I said, arbitrary, seemingly random traits that humans have imposed upon them. It's really human-induced devolution or something like it.

I say whip it. Whip it good.

[darthbatman]

science ? how about this http://www.futuretimeline.net/

[plhogan]

science ? how about this http://www.futuretimeline.net/

No science involved there.

[devnulljp]

As adorable as a pet fox would be, isn't dog breeding at a point where it really does nothing to benefit the dogs and sacrifices their better health for an arbitrary set of "preferable" aspects? Why would we want to replicate that apart for research?

This stuff started out with the goal of breeding foxes for fur. But they selected for the tamest animals to make their job of raising and killing them easier, but what came along for the ride were a bunch of characters associated with domestic dogs. That's interesting from an evolutionary and a historical perspective. (It's also a big fuck you to evolution deniers, but that's another story).

[snipelfritz]

As adorable as a pet fox would be, isn't dog breeding at a point where it really does nothing to benefit the dogs and sacrifices their better health for an arbitrary set of "preferable" aspects? Why would we want to replicate that apart for research?

This stuff started out with the goal of breeding foxes for fur. But they selected for the tamest animals to make their job of raising and killing them easier,

I can get behind this.

but what came along for the ride were a bunch of characters associated with domestic dogs. That's interesting from an evolutionary and a historical perspective. (It's also a big fuck you to evolution deniers, but that's another story).

Yeah, evolution, that's real. I think we can all agree that's real. Yeah, it gives more scientific proof for what we already know, which is good from an isolated, experimental perspective, but I keep getting distracted and can't remember what point I was getting at. I'm pretty sure there really wasn't one.