Selecting for one trait, or a small number of them, and failing to recognize that individual organisms must be integrated with their environment, leads to catastrophe, as this interview with Bill Muir explains.
Almost everyone who thought about eugenics at that time unquestionably assumed that creating a better society was a matter of selecting the most able individuals, or “hereditary genius”, as Galton put it. Against this background, consider an experiment conducted in the 1990’s by William M. Muir, Professor of Animal Sciences at Purdue University. The purpose of the experiment was to increase the egg-laying productivity of hens. The hens were housed in cages with nine hens per cage. Very simply, the most productive hen from each cage was selected to breed the next generation of hens.
If egg-laying productivity is a heritable trait, then the experiment should produce a strain of better egg layers, but that’s not what happened. Instead, the experiment produced a strain of hyper-aggressive hens, as shown in the first photograph. There are only three hens because the other six were murdered and the survivors have plucked each other in their incessant attacks. Egg productivity plummeted, even though the best egg-layers had been selected each and every generation.
The reason for this perverse outcome is easy to understand, at least in retrospect. The most productive hen in each cage was the biggest bully, who achieved her productivity by suppressing the productivity of the other hens. Bullying behavior is a heritable trait, and several generations were sufficient to produce a strain of psychopaths.
In a parallel experiment, Muir monitored the productivity of the cages and selected all of the hens from the best cages to breed the next generation of hens. The result of that experiment is shown in the second photograph. All nine hens are alive and fully feathered. Egg productivity increased 160% in only a few generations, an almost unheard of response to artificial selection in animal breeding experiments.
Weirdly, though, Muir goes on to claim that this experiment shows that capitalism is the best possible system, which just goes to show that American indoctrination is very effective. It seems to me, rather, that it shows that you can’t decide ahead of time what traits are desirable, but that they have to emerge organically in concert with other properties of the organism, and deciding ahead of time that humans must be guided by one ideology or the other is a huge mistake.
His point is actually about markets, not capitalism although he doesn’t realise it. More people should understand the difference.
It shows the polar fucking opposite of that…
The experiment that empowered the individual
jobegg creators with no regard for the population on the whole was pretty much capitalism in anutegg shell, and it failed in an appropriately spectacular fashion.Yup, seems to me like the communist hens did best while the libertarian-capitalist hens ended up with a blood bath.
Psychopathic chickens! Science what are you doing?
Let’s not go too far the other way. These are not capitalist chickens OR socialist chickens. These are chickens that were raised in an environment that either narrowly focused on selection for one specific trait, or a that supported selection for a broader range of traits, that included cooperativity.
Back to the dinosaurs!
+++
This actually explains a lot about some chickens recently acquired by some people nearly related to me. (a) Their appearance and (b) their attitude. Looks like we’ll be having generations of psychopathic chicken eggs out in the country. Or maybe, with the expanded space and less direct competition for resources, they’ll all calm down a bit. (The poor rooster was acquired from a free-range farmyard and still has no idea of what’s happening around him.)
You’re right, they’re proletarian chickens manipulated by the system!
Yep. I’m no biologist, but it seems like the moral of the story is that the selective pressure you’re imposing might not be the selective pressure you think you’re imposing. Natural selection is good at finding low-cost solutions to the problem, and the solution you’re hoping for is unlikely to be the lowest-cost solution.
rq,
Ha!
“Muir goes on to claim that this experiment shows that capitalism is the best possible system”
No he doesn’t, if you read carefully. Muir says:
“Multi-level selection is powerful, but requires safeguards to prevent cheating and breakdowns of that path. Ironically, between group (company) selection based on capitalism is the only way to keep the system honest. In a capitalistic society, those groups (companies) where cooperation fails will soon be out of business. This process is social selection at the group (company) level. The trust me attitude of an autocratic socialistic society cannot provide adequate safeguards to allow social evolution to keep evolving.”
In other words, multi-level selection occurs between companies because capitalism allows companies to fail.
He talks about ***autocratic*** socialist societies: he doesn’t mention ***democratic*** socialist societies which have other mechanisms (in addition to capitalism, such as regulations and lawsuits) for allowing companies to fail.
Eugenics always embraced the ‘selection’ half of Darwin while totally dropping the ball on the ‘radiation’ half.
If all you do is select, you get a smaller and smaller gene pool, more inbreeding, and a population that gets more and more fragile in the face of unknown future threats.
Proper Darwinism would put a lot more emphasis on diversity as a measure of species’ health.
And there aren’t any autocratic capitalists?
@multitool #12:
Rupert Murdoch has told me to tell you that the answer to your question is ‘no’.
I don’t know, I can sort of see the parallels.
Evolution and free markets produce efficient outcomes automatically, even while we’d never be able to do so deliberately, but the efficient outcome they produce is almost never the most desirable outcome. Attempting to produce a more desirable outcome by abandoning evolution and free markets in favor of eugenics and communism will inevitably backfire. However, attempting to produce a more desirable outcome by influencing those processes through introduced selective pressures or regulations can work— although the law of unintended consequences always threatens our efforts.
If “capitalism” means regulations to suppress fraud and externalities, an extensive social safety net, strong antitrust laws, open borders, no bigotry, and no inheritance of wealth then I will concede that “capitalism” done right is the best economic system. Of course, meeting all those conditions would probably require a world so utopian that any economic system would work, but that’s another matter.
““Multi-level selection is powerful, but requires safeguards to prevent cheating and breakdowns of that path. Ironically, between group (company) selection based on capitalism is the only way to keep the system honest. In a capitalistic society, those groups (companies) where cooperation fails will soon be out of business. ”
Yes. And what we as a society “evolved” to deal with companies cooperating in such a fashion was called the Sherman Anti-Trust Act”
That’s a different argument than the one Muir made, but it does seem to fit with his whole “yay markets!” thing.
I think the idea is that corporations are like the chicken cages, where internal dysfunction is selected against because the whole cage can be destroyed if employees aren’t cooperative with each other.
Yet surprisingly, highly dysfunctional corporations still exist. From a group selection point of view, it is probably because the corp is made of many sub-cages, EG the top 1% vs everyone else, whose internal loyalties override the rest. I’ve been there.
But you don’t need capitalism to create group selection. The intentional communities movement is very communistic but made of many sub-cells of people spread across the country. They are all connected together but are free to succeed or fail separately. Dysfunction tends to weed itself out.
Heck, even corporations aren’t one-and-the same as capitalism. Commerce and ownership can happen without them.
Also keep in mind that group selection is only as good as what you are selecting *for*. Corporations select for profitability. If that’s all you define as good you can easily destroy everything else, and flunk evolution in the real-life sense.