Could we breed dogs as smart as people?

I think so. A while ago I emailed an evolutionary biologist with the same question.

My first email:

How long would it take to breed a dog with intelligence comparable to that of a human? how many generations? so it could understand language, read, learn maths and so on. maybe even a few other adaptations so it could speak.

is there any research which looks at this kind of question? all i've really found on the internet is the tamed russian fox stuff.

my guess is that it would take only a couple of hundred generations.

He replied:

This is an interesting question. I suspect that it would take more than a couple of hundred generations to produce a dog with human-like linguistic abilities. That would require major restructuring of the brain, as well as the larynx, tongue, etc. Full human intelligence would probably require many 1000s of generations, and I don't think a canine, which is very different from a primate in many ways, could ever evolve the same kind of intelligence that we have, even if it could perhaps evolve to be much smarter than it is now.

On the other hand, there's some evidence that certain dog breeds have acquired an impressive ability to understand human language. Check out the link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/science/18dog.html

I responded with this:

I guess It would be easier to select for a breed of dog which was especially good at what the border collie can do in that article. Despite the fact that dogs have much smaller brains than chimps, they're better at reading signals from humans, and know what a pointing finger means - wolves can't do this. So rather than trying to breed towards a human-brained dog, you'd have a creature which was exceptional at what modern dogs are already good at. it might not be very hard to breed a dog which was good at something only humans were previously capable of.

I think breeding dogs in this way would be interesting for another reason which you mentioned - they're canines, not primates. If we could increase their brain size to something similar to that of a human, I'm sure their brains would work in a very different way. and you wouldn't have to even get close to human brain size in the first place for some interesting things to happen.

I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I don't think it would take very long to breed a dog which could understand human language very well. I'm essentially pulling a number out of my arse here, but I think you could do it within 100 years of breeding. I'm talking about really understanding complex sentence structure.

"Can you make sure the cat doesn't eat the parrot while I'm out?"
"Woof!"
"Thanks buddy."

I don't see why this wouldn't be possible. The fact that dogs and wolves are so closely related is amazing enough, and this happened over a very short amount of time. Here's some info about a rapidly evolving lizard, demonstrating how fast large changes can happen under the right conditions:

In 1971, ten adult P. sicula specimens from the island of Pod Kopište were transported 3.5 km east to the island of Pod Mrčaru (both Croatian islands lie in the Adriatic Sea near Lastovo), where they founded a new bottlenecked population.[3][11] The two islands have similar size, elevation, microclimate, and a general absence of terrestrial predators[11] and the P. sicula expanded for decades without human interference, even outcompeting the (now extinct[3]) local Podarcis melisellensis population.[4]

Following the Yugoslav Wars, scientists returned to Pod Mrčaru and found that the lizards currently occupying Pod Mrčaru differ greatly from those on Pod Kopište. While mitochondrial DNA analyses have verified that P. sicula currently on Pod Mrčaru are genetically indistinguishable from the Pod Kopište source population,[3] the new Pod Mrčaru population of P. sicula was described, in August 2007, as having a larger average size, shorter hind limbs, lower maximal sprint speed and altered response to simulated predatory attacks compared to the original Pod Kopište population.[11] These population changes in morphology and behavior were attributed to "relaxed predation intensity" and greater protection from vegetation on Pod Mrčaru.[11]

In 2008, further analysis revealed that the Pod Mrčaru population of P. sicula have significantly different head morphology (longer, wider, and taller heads) and increased bite force compared to the original Pod Kopište population.[3] This change in head shape corresponded with a shift in diet: Pod Kopište P. sicula are primarily insectivorous, but those on Pod Mrčaru eat substantially more plant matter.[3] The changes in foraging style may have contributed to a greater population density and decreased territorial behavior of the Pod Mrčaru population.[3]

The most surprising[5] difference found between the two populations was the discovery, in the Pod Mrčaru lizards, of cecal valves, which slow down food passage and provide fermenting chambers, allowing commensal microorganisms to convert cellulose to nutrients digestible by the lizards.[3] Additionally, the researchers discovered that nematodes were common in the guts of Pod Mrčaru lizards, but absent from Pod Kopište P. sicula, which do not have cecal valves. The cecal valves, which occur in less than 1 percent of all known species of scaled reptiles,[5] have been described as an "evolutionary novelty, a brand new feature not present in the ancestral population and newly evolved in these lizards".[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_wall_lizard

Pig Dog - Page 10

Pig Dog page 11

The potential of crowdsourcing problems via games

I'm very excited about the potential of crowdsourcing via video games.

Video games are designed to capture and engross players, and motivate them to play for as long as possible. And there are many people who are quite happy to oblige. They struggle and toil to defeat enemies, collaborate and organise themselves to solve problems. Many millions of hours of work are dumped into merely playing video games every day.

At the same time, many people have trouble with motivation, struggle with unemployment, can't get the training they require,etc., or there is simply very little work they can do locally.

To make a car analogy, it's as if the engine (effort from gamers) is revving at 6000 RPM, but no power is being transferred to the wheels (the industrial output of society). Video games can be the gearbox which manages and transfers that power.

In 2010, Jane McGonigal speculated about this in a TED talk:

Since then, what she predicted has happened. Gaming has been harnessed to solve a real-world problem - protein folding.

Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein. 

The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations. 

The researchers have previously reported successes by Foldit players in folding proteins1, but the latest work moves into the realm of protein design, a more open-ended problem. By posing a series of puzzles to Foldit players and then testing variations on the players’ best designs in the lab, researchers have created an enzyme with more than 18-fold higher activity than the original. The work is published today in Nature Biotechnology. 

“I worked for two years to make these enzymes better and I couldn’t do it,” says Justin Siegel, a post-doctoral researcher working in biophysics in Baker’s group. “Foldit players were able to make a large jump in structural space and I still don’t fully understand how they did it.”

Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.nature.com/news/victory-for-crowdsourced-biomolecule-design-1.9872

We've finally dipped our toes in the water and immediately solved a real world-problem, far exceeding all expectations in the process. We should be working like mad to harness this potential. Government funding, private investment, whatever.

And, I propose that once gamers start solving real-world problems, they should get real-world rewards. Money. Employment in gaming.

I also think that the most effective way to do this, is to create games more like WoW and less like Foldit. Most of the time, anyway. I don't see why you can't hide real problem solving beneath a more attractive and viscerally rewarding front-end.

Pig Dog - Page 9

Pig Dog page 10

Naked cannibals aren't sensational enough for the news, apparently

Did you hear that a couple of people died on an Italian cruidse ship? Meanwhile...

Watch the rest here: http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-liberia-2

Pig Dog - Page 8

Pig Dog page 9

Mammals who behave like ants

We're all familiar with eusocial behaviour in insects - like bees, ants, termites, wasps and so on. There is a queen which produces a large number of sterile workers who build tunnels, nests and collect food, and there are specialties like the larger guards. They cooperatively care for the young produced by the queen.

I had no idea that there were mammals who had developed the same behaviour. Just 2 kinds - the naked mole rat and the Damaraland mole rat. I've found more info about the naked mole rat in the short time I've spent researching them today, so that's what I'll talk about.

The naked mole rat - image stolen from Wikipedia

It lives in networks of tunnels under Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia.

The queen is the only female who can reproduce, along with about 3 males. Her offspring become the sterile workers. They develop specialties such as burrowing or collecting food. The larger ones are more aggressive in the instance of an attack on the nest.

The queen must always defend her postion from other females, sometimes violently. If she dies, she is replaced by another female who becomes fertile and undergoes physical changes to better handle making babies.

They mine for large tubers, their main source of food. They eat the inside but leave the outside, allowing it to regenerate. They also eat their own feces.

They live in colonies of between 20 and 300.
They live particularly long for a small rodent, up to 28 years.
They're apparently immune to cancer.
They don't feel pain when exposed to acid or capscacin.
They are in no danger whatsoever of going extinct.

That's just incredible to me. I suppose this would be considered a kind of convergent evolution. Shame the universe is so damn big and everything else is terribly far away, I'd like to know if creatures on other planets have evolved the same behaviour.