Wendy Northcutt - The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection

The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection contains cautionary tales of misadventure. It is intended to be viewed as a safety manual, not a how-to guide. The stories illustrate evolution working through natural selection: Those whose actions have lethal personal consequences are weeded out of the gene pool. Your decisions can kill you, so pay attention and stay alive

For further information about how to avoid the scythe of natural selection, read Darwin's lessons on safety, science, and the social implications of evolution.

Safety Class
www.DarwinAwards.com/book/teach.html

PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group,
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc.

Copyright Wendy Northcutt, 2001
All rights reserved.

Northcutt, Wendy.
The Darwin Awards II: unnatural selection / Wendy Northcutt.
p. cm.
ISBN 0 7865 2690 4

Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

First edition (electronic): July 2002

Cartoon of Charles Darwin, from the Vanity Fair series Men of the Day, published in 1871.

I love fools experiments;
I am always making them.
Charles Darwin (18091882)

CHAPTER 6
Animals:
Pall of the Wild

Theyve been treating these chimps less than human.

Senator Mary Jane Garcia

What separates man from other animals is humanity. Senator Roman Maes explaining his opposition to the death penalty

both from the Santa Fe New Mexican

The call of the wild is heard less frequently in our tame neighborhoods, but people still manage to get in trouble with sheep, sharks, wasps, and lobsters. Tales of wilderness woe remind us whos really in charge of the earth.

D ogs are a species we have been breeding, and inbreeding, for 12,000 years. They are a study in genetic heritability. We find in dogs that you can selectively breed for:

Dogs branched off from the wolves in the not-so-distant past. As we evolved from gatherers to farmers, we began to collect in settlements, and wolves collected on the borders. Animals that were particularly usefulfor example those that brought killed game to the camp, or fetched slipperswere rewarded with scraps of food. Those that were dangerous were killed or driven away. People kept their favorite dogs alive through lean times. Thus an artificial selection was applied to the animals surrounding our villages.

We have taken the dog genome and selected for particular traits, and in doing so created dog breedsinbred lines with less genetic diversity. Each dog breed represents a subset of the entire genome. Saint Bernards are large, muscular, and furry. Golden retrievers are golden brown, docile, and prone to spinal degeneration. Sheepdogs try to corral sheep, children, and grocery carts. One variety of guard dog barks when a stranger is a mile away, another when the stranger is twenty feet away. Guess which is quieter in your backyard!

We also bred out traits such as aggression and violence. Today, dogcatchers and city restrictions on vicious dogs continue to eliminate dangerous behaviors. Put down a vicious animal, and you eliminate its vicious contribution to the dog genome. It is a community effort to limit the spread of dangerous dog genesthough, admittedly, dangerous dogs are often trained now rather than born as there is an unfortunate trend among a limited number of dog breeders to favor ferocious behavior in fighting dogs. But, overall, breeders select well-behaved dogs.

In short, our many dog breeds represent thousands of generations of genetic manipulation. Reshaping the dog genomeplaying God with the dogis a commonplace hubris that few question.

We learn from dogs that many canine personality traits are inherited, so surely human personality is also linked to the genome. We are born with the capacity for speech; other complex systems may well have a genetic basis. Might we also have innate confidence, ruthlessness, optimism, and a tendency to ignore authority? We havent defined the full extent of genetic influence on personality, in humans or in animals.

Though we havent defined the exact proportion of nature versus nurture when it comes to personality traits, most have a clear genetic component. How quickly we have selected for specific traits in dogs! If we wanted to, we could do the same for humans. Can you imagine breeding out violent aggression in man, as we do in dogs? Humankind condemns the notion, known as Social Darwinism, that humans can be selectively bred to become a better species. Our society forbids taking such ideas into the realm of reality, as happened during Hitlers abhorrent ethnic cleansing campaign.

We find similarly repugnant other practices which affect the gene pool. The unsavory idea that Homo sapiens murdered intelligent cousins in our rise to ascendancy reeks of selective breeding. And we have nearly universal prohibitions against incest and cannibalism. Our cultural taboos parallel our need for genetic diversity, thus the very ethical notions that we hold in such great regard may themselves be genetically determined!

The evil aspect of selective breeding lies in the imposition of the idea on unwilling victims. But most of us feel no particular grief when a person inflicts genetic improvement on himself by eliminating his genes through his own foolish actions. So enjoy the following Darwinian examples of self-selectionwith animal assistance!

A motorcycle taxi driver in Phnom Penh challenged his neighbor to stand beneath a hornets nest while two men pelted it with stones. The fifty-three-year old neighbor should have known better, but he had a local reputation as a strong man to uphold. He stood beneath the nest and the pelting commenced. The man endured the pain of countless stinging hornets before expiring from the toxic injections. Apparently he was not as strong as he thought.