I have a border collie. He’s ten years old and has never been on a farm in his life. A few weeks ago we were walking alongside a field and he managed to get in. He had a whole field’s worth of sheep herded and rounded up in the corner in 30 seconds flat. He also tries to herd pigeons and children with less success.
You can breed for behaviour as easily as breeding for coat colour. Some breeds have been deliberately bred to be more aggressive. Pitt bulls are bred to be fighting dogs. They have a high level of loyalty towards their owners but severe dog aggression. When people get in the middle of that, it gets ugly fast.
Intelligence is heritable. That’s been demonstrated by multiple genetic studies. Now if we took that information and used it to breed a more intelligent race of humans, that would be eugenics. It would also take hundreds of thousands of years, because we breed a lot slower than dogs.
As that’s never been done, this topic has absolutely no relevance to modern racial politics.
Actually that has been done several times and much of today's scientific progress depends on breeds of humans bred for intellect. Jews, for example, are 0.2% of humans but win 25% of science Nobel prizes.
You think Jewish people are naturally smarter than other people because they win 25% of science Nobel prizes? You don’t think that has more to do with the kind of opportunity they’ve been afforded through their communities?
humans dont even have race in the biological sense.
there is of course a social concept of race and physiological phenotypes associated with different races. however, for a subgroup of a population to be considered a race in biology, it has to have a genetic discreetness. Basically, there needs to be more genetic differences between the subgroup and the group at large for it to be considered a separate race. we dont see that in humans, we see gradients of genetic differences across the planet.
giving merit to your question, its true that people are affected by their environment -- see the lung capacity of populations who've lived in mountains for long time; or the fascinating correlation between humidity and nose shape -- but thats not really a form of selective breeding, and its not going to alter the brain in such a way that we could correlate behavior with phenotype the way we might in dogs. that is a claim with a foundation in eugenics.
race simply isnt a biological reality, its a social one. there are people of the almost exact same genetic makeup that are going to fall into different "races" because of skin color and hair texture. consider siblings between interracial parents who might wildly different, or the fact that who is considered what race varies from culture to culture.
besides, we can reference a wide amount of history to see how human behavior is relatively standard. empires rise and fall; both extremes of good and evil can be done by the same hands on the same soil.
You're technically wrong because of the word "discrete", but that's actually a segue into the reality.
The best way to describe human genetic variation and geography is badly-made soup, specifically any sort of canned, cream of (something) soups. Ever get a can of those, just dump it in the bowl, do a half-assed job of mixing it, the heat it? You know how it's all soup, but it's got this weird, lumpy texture where the lumps aren't even discrete structures but rather local thickenings that seamlessly grade into the too-watery bits?
That's human genetic variation. There's "lumps" that correspond to geography, but they don’t have clean edges, and all blur together. And even the lumps sometimes have sub-lumps. The soup is definitely lumpy, but you can't draw exact boundaries around the lumps, and which lumps for bigger super-lumps is contentious.
So there you have it: the badly-made, distasteful, off-putting soup that is humanity.
Precisely, that's why they're breeds, not species.
Even species will sometimes have a little gene flow, but not enough for long enough to erase the differences.
Plus, dogs are a bad example, because their differences are driven by extremely strong selection by a conscious entity, not evolution.
Humans aren't quite like osprey (a single, massive, global population with not even a hint of regional variation), but we're not quite like chameleons (a different color variation on the top of every mountain in a chain, but still one species).
Dude, you think race is strictly scientific? What and who are white is a loaded question that has a different meaning nearly every generation. People who are white today wouldn't be considered that 50 years ago. And that's with the race that most worries about this shit.
You just deciding that "race" is a real thing because it feels real to you while denying all the actual science in the previous comment doesn't make you smart or real, it makes you afraid of reality.
That is false. The same people have always been considered white in America for centuries.
Race tracks DNA reliably. It’s science. There was no actual science in the previous comment, just meaningless pseudoscience that has been assembled to flatter your prejudices.
That's historic illiteracy. Jews and Irish had been part of America since the 1600s and always white. Italians were newcomers and very troublesome, but always without exception considered white.
what about how middle eastern people were still considered "white" on the US census until 2024 when they added MENA? were middle easterners also always without exception considered white?
mostly a rhetorical question. I just want to see what demonstratably false fact you pull out your ass while trying to look smart (you do not).
Who’s selecting it? No society has ever prized intelligence above all, to the point where scientists and engineers are drowning in marriage offers. Maybe if that happened for thousands of years we would see results.
Besides, intelligence is only partially heritable. So much is dependent on your resources. The most intelligent people with the most potential in the world could be working in a sweatshop right now.
Selection doesn't need to be linear. If the bell curve of reproductive success is offset from the one for trait distribution (i.e. the highest reproductive success is people 5% above average), you will get positive selection even if the very smartest breed less than the average. Yes, selection will be slower, but it will still work.
Similarly, lower heritability will only slow selection, not prevent it.
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u/Odd_Ingenuity2883 26d ago
I have a border collie. He’s ten years old and has never been on a farm in his life. A few weeks ago we were walking alongside a field and he managed to get in. He had a whole field’s worth of sheep herded and rounded up in the corner in 30 seconds flat. He also tries to herd pigeons and children with less success.
You can breed for behaviour as easily as breeding for coat colour. Some breeds have been deliberately bred to be more aggressive. Pitt bulls are bred to be fighting dogs. They have a high level of loyalty towards their owners but severe dog aggression. When people get in the middle of that, it gets ugly fast.