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Scientists Breed Big-Brained Guppies To Demonstrate Evolution's Trade-Offs
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have long suspected that big brains come with an evolutionary price — but now they've published the first experimental evidence to support that suspicion, based on their efforts to breed big-brained fish. A Swedish team found it relatively easy to select and interbreed common guppies to produce bigger (or smaller) brains — as much as 9.3 percent bigger, to be precise (abstract). But the bigger-brained fish also tended to have smaller guts and produce fewer babies."
...oh nevermind.
"But the bigger-brained fish also tended to have smaller guts and produce fewer babies"
Of course. Smart fish stay kids free to live fun and awesome lives in the wet.
Guppies make too many babies in my tank, any way. How do we order these?
Researcher: "We didn't find anything commercially useful, but at least the fish can do my taxes for me."
Table-ized A.I.
Sounds like something I could have read on Slashdot. But honestly, I'm really bad at remembering stuff. I'm not that smart either...
But for some reason, the very smartest guppies had no interest in swimming at all but would just hang around the bottom of the tank, head side down.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
More bacon!
I had a flame... but she had a fire.
if they found a way to selectively breed -smarter- guppies, not guppies with larger brains. I wonder how you would test a guppy's IQ?
This was demonstrated in the first 5 minutes of Idiocracy.
A Swedish team found it relatively easy to select and interbreed
A rotund researcher licked his lips as he continued, "... a delicious side effect that we noticed was that the larger brained fish had an overall higher fat content and therefore made lutefisk that hardly tasted like soap! On a side note, we will have to breed many thousand more fish to make sure that we have not stumbled upon a localized minimum for reproductive abilities. My colleagues would agree with me if they weren't so busy utilizing the restrooms."
My work here is dung.
Turns out, surprisingly, I actually did learn everything there is to know in High School.
Very Funny! - Now off I go to watch some ice hockey [OHL] where I get to see those that float upon the top of the frozen pond.
Of course there will be trade offs if you inner breed to achieve a desirable modification. Just like the quality propagates, the defects propagate also.
If I were to have published this paper I wouldn't have used the term "artificial evolution". I would have called it "Intelligently Designed Evolution" just to make everyone rage. Especially since they were selecting for bigger brains.
Think of the guppies!
Authority questions you. Return the favor. -- d474
This is what they should do next:
Selectively breed for bigger brains, bigger guts and more babies.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
...a smaller gut for a bigger brain. Alas, it was not meant to be...
This doesn't seem very enlightening. If small guts are normally selected against and you specifically breed them, providing they also have large brains, it should come as no surprise that your large brained guppies have smaller guts on average. If all the large brained guppies have smaller guts then brain size and gut size are probably controlled by the same genes: in guppies. That's interesting but not very general.
I would be more interested to see if they could genetically engineer guppies with large brains and normal size guts and see if they are competitive with their unenhanced cousins. Alternatively, but less conclusively, they could attempt to breed large brained guppies with normal sized guts. A negative result would suggest that either this combination of traits either can not be encoded or does not survive if encoded. How well understood is the guppy genome?
Who said evolution had to be natural? Did one breed of dog not evolve into several others through selective breeding? Evolution is a result; natural selection, selective breeding, etc are a means to that end. I have to agree (at least I'm assuming we agree) that this doesn't necessarily prove much. When working with a limited gene pool and a short amount of time, you won't necessarily mimic the results of eons of natural selection. Maybe their big brained guppies had a dominant gene for small guts and low libido, but that doesn't mean the guppy population as whole shares these traits. Also, with enough time, you could have all sorts of genetic variations that could potentially result in fat, horny, big-brained guppies. I'm not saying their research is patently flawed, just that it may or may not reflect trends in the real world. It's kinda impossible to know for sure without a spare universe and infinite amounts of time.
The article can be summarized as so: "Swedish Fish have bigger brains."
Actually still evolution. The natural environment of these guppies changed from a tank in a pet store to a tank that happened to be in a lab filled with apes who like to kill small brained guppies for their own amusement (or some other reason, who can say why white coated apes do what they do). Through random mutation some guppies had larger brains. Because of the selection pressure in this new environment those guppies tended to survive to produce offspring while the predator killed their smaller brained counterparts.
Same shit different day. Replace the apes in coats with some other environment change that favors big brained guppies and kills off the dumb ones and the result would be pretty much the same. Guppies have no magical sixth sense that tells them to do something genetically different in the presence of guppy slaying apes than guppy slaying anything that isn't apes.
Not evolution
Obviously this is intelligent design.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
What the movie "Idiocracy" already taught us...
"That result suggests that bigger brains are somehow associated with smaller broods "
Indeed, it has everything to do with evolution. Corn and rice and some of their weed pests have evolved according to the attempted controls of farmers. I remember learning of a weed found in Japanese rice paddies. Originally the plant looked nothing like a young rice plant, but since farmers weeded it vigorously, the weed evolved so that for some of its life cycle it resembled strongly a young rice plant, very hard to farmers to differentiate from real rice. (Sorry, references not at hand. Perhaps it was on something like PBS Nova.)
For an intelligent speculation on how larger or smaller brains might be influenced evolutionarily by nothing more than the natural environment, see Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 novel _Galápagos_.
Do they know for a fact this relation exists?
Or is it an indirect cause of hastening the size increase of their brains, which is pushing more resources towards them to keep them alive?
Evolution might need the time to actually balance out resources more before we could really make that a fact.
A brain size increase in such a short time is pretty damn huge, biologically speaking.
Fast evolution could be the problem here. We know that high pressure to evolve results in instability and high numbers of mistakes if it continues for too many generations. It is both a great and terrible thing from a species and individual standpoint, respectively.
The randomness of mate selection is a natural barrier to evolution that has kept it mostly stable over all this time.
We'd really need to experiment with this on a bunch of other species, and continue it for quite a few more generations to see if anything actually does balance out.
Martian Scientists Breed Big-Brained Apes To Demonstrate Evolution's Trade-Offs
As one commenter of the TFA wrote:
joe mota: The key is not just the number of progeny, but their ability to survive and procreate. if smarter fish have higher survival it compensates for reduced fecundity and evolution goes that way. It seems to me that with humans, the adoption of a higher energy diet would have coincided with the increased intelligence necessary to procure it.
I agree. It's not just how many babies they produce, but how many survive to breed themselves. It looks like the researchers didn't test for that, or couldn't in a lab environment.
...the big-brained guppies, guided by their increasing intelligence conclude:
The human race stands in the way of their evolution and must be destroyed.
Guppies are not being designed.
Their evolution is being guided.
I know it sounds clever, but that's not really what "intelligent design" means when it's being used as a proxy for creationism.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...what does the scientists' octo-parrot think of all this?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Did anyone else think that said "puppies"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I think there's a difference between breeding and evolution. Breeding plays with existing traits and amplifies/changes them. Evolution actually creates something new. You can't "breed" a dog to have wings or gills or anything that the ancestor wolves didn't have. But you can play with size and hair length and things like that.
Wow. This is modded up. What a poor understanding of evolution. You just need mutation and selection. It doesn't really matter whether selection comes from the environment or man.
Actually, seems more like big-brain design.
The large brained fish decided to focus on their careers instead of settling down to raise a family.
If it is artificically introduced, then by definition, it isn't an evolutionary tradeoff.
Their evolution is being guided.
Which only means that the creationists will start calling day-age creationism "Spirit-directed evolution".
I actually thought of that as a snappy comeback on facebook a few days ago. But the fact is that it's not evolution, it's "artificial selection". It's the same process that turned wolves into man's best friend over the last 20,000 or so years.
Do you have ESP?
Woah, that was unexpected. I know one of the co-authors and help proofreading the article months ago :-)
There are quite a few posts talking about how this isn't natural selection. How it's not evolution. How they should have done this with genetic engineering. How everyone who can write a comment would have done it better than these guys. That's very cute.
It's important to keep in mind that natural selection will effectively span the full probability space of all possible traits as far as offspring go, and only the strongest survive.
What that means is twofold:
1. Given that you're trying to study tradeoffs in nature within the same species, you obviously don't want to engineer any combination of traits that wouldn't occur naturally.
2. What the scientists did was exactly what they should have done. They selected traits that could have occurred naturally, but with a small probability. By enhancing these traits, you can then assess how over time and generations the inheritance would play out.
Obviously, the study's scope wasn't as far-reaching as the ultimate evolutionary end-game of guppies (that would require somehow objectively quantifying the increase in survivability due to larger brain size vs. sheer number of offspring), but they do manage to demonstrate a pretty strong dependence (more than correlation, as this was a directly applied change vs. a control) of the compromise in energy expenditures in developing organs.
Yes, if the results were anything other than "common sense", it would be remarkably exciting news that would warrant further study as to the hiding spot of our brainy fish-overlords. But in science, sometimes it's just as difficult (albeit slightly less rewarding) to isolate a fundamental tenet in its most distilled form.
I read the article but it didn’t address this. Gene expression takes energy. Large dinosaurs spent a lot of energy on both creating and maintaining their size. We have to assume they had a lot of food available.
While the larger brain increased cognitive capabilities of the guppies, did it also reduce the fitness of the specimens?
Would the children of Nepalese sherpas, if raised in lower altitudes, have the same lung capacity of their brethren? It’s a question of gene expression.
Humans killed off all of the large animals such as mastodons and the original bison (bison are an interesting story, just watched a show about it). Humans represented a huge negative pressure on them, and they are no more.
Gene expression is probably controlled by environmental factors. I find this stuff fascinating.
BlameBillCosby.com
Believing in God doesn't have to mean he's intervening in nature
You're talking about deism, right?
He who wrote the program controls the results.
And has the power to interact with the program through a debugging hook called holy spirit. Ever seen Jehovah God's active force represented as a dove? That's His mouse cursor.
Sounds to me like you've got a big gut and lots of kids!
At least that guy has more guts than you
Just where do you think these new things come from through evolution if not some kind of selective breeding? Evolution isn't magic; some wolf doesn't just go "gee, those birds look yummy" then birth pups with wings.
Princeton: "Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, and Model". I presented an analogical story about why simpler thinking could be better for survival because it allowed faster reaction times. I developed some of those ideas into a couple of conference presentations and made a couple related simulations of self-replicating robots in the late 1980s.
Then I wrote an (unpublished) essay about it in a PhD grad program at SUNY Stony Brook in Ecology and Evolution around the early 1990s, outlining why Hydras did not have brains, focusing there more on the actual cost to the organism to have a big brain. Not much traction there then. I had another cool idea there about the normal distribution as an ideal search function for an arbitrary discontinuous problem space.
My wife (who I met in E&E grad school around then) did her graduate thesis work on why foraging theory was wrong because sometimes organisms that made "dumb" decisions would do better than ones that all made "Smarter" decisions that set them in competition with each other. Just today we were discussion this, and I was thinking that for social species, it would make sense for individuals to move to a food source with a probability related to its relative size, so that the population could forage optimally. That might explain aspects of human behavior where people seem to make "dumb" decisions, perhaps also reflected in behavior of troops of bonobos or chimps. I might predict that solitary foragers might do less of that? Probably some PhD or even Nobel Prize in that for someone else. :-)
Glad to see this kind of research is going mainstream a couple decades later. Back then, especially as I was motivated in this direction by thinking about robotics and AI, such ideas were very far out of the mainstream. They were not rejected so much as mainly ignored or not understood. Plus, I wanted to build what I thought would be a next stage in human (co-)evolution -- the self-replicating space habitat, and that took things way too far...
I thought about those ideas in part from reading people like Victor Serebriakoff and his book "Brain", Gregory Bateson and "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", Norbert Weiner on Cybernetics and "The Human Use of Human Beings", and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan also underlay some bunch of that. And then at my advisor's suggestion because I was looking into this area, "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by Valentino Braitenberg (possibly a pre-release copy?) and "Man, Robot and Society: Models and Speculations" by Masanao Toda talking about "The Fungus Eater" robot thought experiment. This was before "Evolutionary Psychology" became a field of its own eventually.
It is possible that these time, material, heat, and energy costs of computation may define limits that prevents many of the scenarios people outline for various flavors of computational "Singularity". Like everything, intelligence can have diminishing returns depending on the level and the context -- although it might also have threshold where exceeding some level may change the nature of the survival game entirely too.
Other articles on Slashdot have talked about how individual human intelligence peaked thousands of years ago:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/191217/study-claims-human-intelligence-peaked-two-to-six-millennia-ago
Although environment has a lot to do with intelligence, too. And there are ways that today has the most interesting environment in some ways, even if unhealthy diets and lifestyles are probably greatly diminishing intelligence a lot too these days.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"the bigger-brained fish also tended to have smaller guts and produce fewer babies."
Just like humans!
I have to question the association with size & smarts. 100 years ago in the age of eugenics, there was an effort to measure people- individuals and ethnic groups, and to draw conclusions based on those measurements. There was a general assumption that a large head (and presumably brain) indicated an intelligent person. However, one source that I found from around 1950 stated that the largest brain ever recorded was that of an idiot.
Has this changed? Is there evidence now that size = smarts? Is this true for animals as well as humans? The most recent I had heard (probably 1990s) was that a large brain in relation to body size might indicate intelligence in some species.
So I'm googling around today and this question looks even more complicated, however this
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-brain-size-matter
agrees with most that size alone is meaningless.
Add to that the already debunked 'smaller gut' significance and what's left?
This experiment just looks stupid to me; something that a small brained scientist might try.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Mutation creates anew, selection winnows, evolution is the sum of both effects.
The selection can be 'natural selection' or 'directed selection' and the result is still change over time, otherwise known as evolution.
You're correct in that it is not 'evolution by natural selection'. You're incorrect in that it is still 'evolution'.
Obviously this is intelligent design.
It might be better described as intelligent selection, as none of the initial genetic variation (or new mutations occurring during the process) were created by the researchers.
They aren't that smart ... They still pee in the pool....
I remember learning of a weed found in Japanese rice paddies. Originally the plant looked nothing like a young rice plant, but since farmers weeded it vigorously, the weed evolved so that for some of its life cycle it resembled strongly a young rice plant, very hard to farmers to differentiate from real rice.
That would be Echinochloa oryzoides (Early Barnyard Grass), and the process of artificial selection in agriculture known as Vavilovian Mimicry.
Oats and Rye are believed to be examples of weeds that were so successful at mimicry, that they eventually were domesticated and became "secondary crops".
I can't meet a woman because my brain is too big.
There is a whole in my theory though. If I were so smart wouldn't I be able to better strategize my way there?
"But the bigger-brained fish also tended to have smaller guts and produce fewer babies."
Well, that makes sense. As we all know, educated people have fewer children and often eat healthier.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Don't be silly, it's all a hoax created by the Germans in WW2.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... because I don't work so hard. Guppies are so frightfully clever, and they all wear grey. And Goldfish are stupid. Besides, they all wear gold. No, I don't want to play with goldfish children.....
That doesn't mean they were smarter. Perhaps the smaller-brained ones have ADHD, dyslexia, asshatburger syndrome, or just get nervous taking tests.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Man is a part of the environment anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, there is no significant difference. Evolution is a change in allele frequency in a population, due to various causes including both drift and selection, acting on alleles created by mutations. The only difference between this case and "natural" selection is that some scientists created the selection pressure intentionally, instead of it being accidental. The guppies evolved to survive in a new environment that happened to have been created by white humans for that purpose, but nature itself creates odd environments with different selection pressures all the time.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
Inner breeding requires joins, so it's not webscale.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do if they stopped being them, they wouldn't return to normal after a few hundred generations?
Stupid autocorrect. SO, BREEDING.
Woah, this intelligent guppy posts on slashdot with an ID. The ones I bred only post AC
Them sure are smart fish you have there. Ask them how they post AC, I want to learn me that there trick.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
film is what it is, but the introduction of the film on evolution explains it brillantly
I must have gotten my Irritable Bowel Syndrome from my enormous brain.
I wonder what the correlation is between intelligence and gastrointestinal problems?
Sounds fascinating, thanks! http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The buried lede: Idiocracy is not species-specific.
I do love me some Swedish Fish.