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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.
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.
This was demonstrated in the first 5 minutes of Idiocracy.
...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.
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.
See, for me this brought to mind an entirely different kind of swedish fish.
Though gummy fish with huge brains seem kind of scary actually.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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?
I second this, as long as the dumber breed is kept separate from the main population.
More bacon!
Actually, though, this experiment does not prove much of anything. The particular gene they were selecting for might be associated with another gene for small guts, for example. And poorer nutrition would almost certainly imply smaller broods.
We know that many genes are not independent, for example. In order to prove that this trait (bigger brains) by itself was actually the CAUSE of smaller guts and smaller broods, an awful lot of process of elimination has to take place, and I don't see that they did that.
Also, the fact that smarter primates might have smaller broods is pretty much irrelevant to their findings. The same is true of smarter humans when compared to most of their peers. So what? Are the researchers trying to claim that the situations are comparable? Generalizing from mice or rats to humans is a pretty huge leap. But THIS... this is just laughable.
Woah, this intelligent guppy posts on slashdot with an ID. The ones I bred only post AC
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.