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Drive me tame
OPINION LETTERS Drive me tame From Geoffrey Patton In his article on taming wild animals, Henry Nicholls presents geneticist Dmitry Belyaev’s intriguing proposition that when our ancient ancestors approached a herd of animals, they identified the less skittish ones and took them home to breed (3 October, p 40). Although the article presents the trait being selected for as tameness rather than aggression, the important factor is most likely to be anxiety. In fact, Cheryl Kassed and Miles Herkenham discovered several years ago that a strain of mice missing a gene subunit, the NF-kappaB p50 protein, seemed to have no sense of fear (Behavioural Brain Research, vol 154, p 577). Unlike most lab mice that run for cover when a human approaches, these animals appeared friendly and curious, approaching people who entered the room. They would not be able to survive in the wild. It may be that this was the first identification of a gene that affects behaviour. I presume
the geneticists described in your story have heard of it. Wheaton, Maryland, US From Don Carson Henry Nicholls reports on Soviet experiments into domesticating wild animals, such as the silver fox, the methodology for which was to select the tamest animals for breeding. The result was tame foxes that even wagged their tails. This is hardly revolutionary: the first animal that a farmer will cull from their herd is the angry one. This practice has probably existed for millennia, stemming from the fact that livestock with bad attitudes are dangerous. Nicholls also reports the search for a species that humans can usefully domesticate from the wild by selecting those with the “tame” gene. I suggest deer, which are farmed directly from the wild. It would certainly save farmers the cost of erecting deer fences to prevent the animals fleeing in response to every scare they encounter. Wadestown, Wellington, New Zealand
Enigma Number 1569 Cardiology BOB WALKER Joe gave Penny a rectangular piece of card 12 centimetres by 8 centimetres with the instruction that she had to draw two intersecting straight lines across the card from adjacent corners. The point of intersection had to be such that by cutting along two of the lines from the intersection point to the edge of the card, a piece of card with an area equal to any multiple (from 1 to 6) of 8 square centimetres could be produced. How far from the nearer shorter side was the point of intersection of the two lines? WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on Wednesday 2 December. The Editor’s decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1569, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to [email protected] (please include your postal address). Answer to 1563 Drawing a line: The lengths of the six lines are 18, 24, 31, 31, 32 and 32 centimetres The winner Tom Flannery of Derby, UK
28 | NewScientist | 31 October 2009
From Collyn Rivers Henry Nicholls claims that cheetahs cannot be domesticated. This puzzled me because, while in the Sahara in 1960, I spent the
better part of a day with a perfectly tame, domesticated cheetah. It wandered around the courtyard and sat purring loudly at my feet. What’s more, the person who was with me, an ex-policeman from Kenya, had owned a cheetah. He told me that it travelled with him in the passenger seat of his MG. Maybe Nicholls has a different definition of tame? Broome, Western Australia Henry Nicholls writes: ■ While many individual cheetahs have been tamed, attempts to breed them in captivity have failed. For more details, see Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel.
Future-proof farms From Ann Hansen Your article on engineering painfree farm animals (5 September, p 8) and the accompanying editorial “Pain-free but not guiltfree” (5 September, p 5), would have benefited from the input of people with experience in rearing domestic livestock. Livestock producers already expend a lot of thought and investment endeavouring to keep livestock comfortable and pain-free, because creatures in constant pain don’t thrive and are, therefore, not cost-efficient.
Even a factory farm has a big economic interest in making the animals comfortable enough to be willing eaters that do not waste metabolic energy on dealing with stress. The real issue for consumers who object to factory farming is that the practices do not allow animals to exhibit their natural behaviours or eat a natural diet. They also feel that a great deal of pollution is caused by keeping animals in such large concentrations. It is not difficult to do things differently. Raising a lot of livestock in a way that ensures them a healthy life – that is, providing them with room to exercise and the food they evolved to eat, such as grasses and clovers for grazing animals – is not expensive or hard. It is also beneficial to the environment, as animal manure and urine in reasonable amounts are the most sustainable fertiliser available. The grasses and clovers on which the animals graze help build soils and stop erosion. Such livestock can produce human food on the large amounts of land that can’t grow crops because it is too dry, rocky, or otherwise unfarmable. Raising livestock under the conditions that fit the way the animals have evolved is the key to a truly sustainable agriculture, and to feeding the human population for the long run. Bloomer, Wisconsin, US
Design from data From David John Sherwin W. Brian Arthur and Robert Cailliau both made the argument on your pages that technology progresses through evolutionary mechanisms (22 August, p 26 and 19 September, p 27, respectively). However, it is part of the received wisdom in the field of reliability engineering that no new design is wholly revolutionary or wholly evolutionary. Rather, design is
the geneticists described in your story have heard of it. Wheaton, Maryland, US From Don Carson Henry Nicholls reports on Soviet experiments into domesticating wild animals, such as the silver fox, the methodology for which was to select the tamest animals for breeding. The result was tame foxes that even wagged their tails. This is hardly revolutionary: the first animal that a farmer will cull from their herd is the angry one. This practice has probably existed for millennia, stemming from the fact that livestock with bad attitudes are dangerous. Nicholls also reports the search for a species that humans can usefully domesticate from the wild by selecting those with the “tame” gene. I suggest deer, which are farmed directly from the wild. It would certainly save farmers the cost of erecting deer fences to prevent the animals fleeing in response to every scare they encounter. Wadestown, Wellington, New Zealand
Enigma Number 1569 Cardiology BOB WALKER Joe gave Penny a rectangular piece of card 12 centimetres by 8 centimetres with the instruction that she had to draw two intersecting straight lines across the card from adjacent corners. The point of intersection had to be such that by cutting along two of the lines from the intersection point to the edge of the card, a piece of card with an area equal to any multiple (from 1 to 6) of 8 square centimetres could be produced. How far from the nearer shorter side was the point of intersection of the two lines? WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on Wednesday 2 December. The Editor’s decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1569, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to [email protected] (please include your postal address). Answer to 1563 Drawing a line: The lengths of the six lines are 18, 24, 31, 31, 32 and 32 centimetres The winner Tom Flannery of Derby, UK
28 | NewScientist | 31 October 2009
From Collyn Rivers Henry Nicholls claims that cheetahs cannot be domesticated. This puzzled me because, while in the Sahara in 1960, I spent the
better part of a day with a perfectly tame, domesticated cheetah. It wandered around the courtyard and sat purring loudly at my feet. What’s more, the person who was with me, an ex-policeman from Kenya, had owned a cheetah. He told me that it travelled with him in the passenger seat of his MG. Maybe Nicholls has a different definition of tame? Broome, Western Australia Henry Nicholls writes: ■ While many individual cheetahs have been tamed, attempts to breed them in captivity have failed. For more details, see Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel.
Future-proof farms From Ann Hansen Your article on engineering painfree farm animals (5 September, p 8) and the accompanying editorial “Pain-free but not guiltfree” (5 September, p 5), would have benefited from the input of people with experience in rearing domestic livestock. Livestock producers already expend a lot of thought and investment endeavouring to keep livestock comfortable and pain-free, because creatures in constant pain don’t thrive and are, therefore, not cost-efficient.
Even a factory farm has a big economic interest in making the animals comfortable enough to be willing eaters that do not waste metabolic energy on dealing with stress. The real issue for consumers who object to factory farming is that the practices do not allow animals to exhibit their natural behaviours or eat a natural diet. They also feel that a great deal of pollution is caused by keeping animals in such large concentrations. It is not difficult to do things differently. Raising a lot of livestock in a way that ensures them a healthy life – that is, providing them with room to exercise and the food they evolved to eat, such as grasses and clovers for grazing animals – is not expensive or hard. It is also beneficial to the environment, as animal manure and urine in reasonable amounts are the most sustainable fertiliser available. The grasses and clovers on which the animals graze help build soils and stop erosion. Such livestock can produce human food on the large amounts of land that can’t grow crops because it is too dry, rocky, or otherwise unfarmable. Raising livestock under the conditions that fit the way the animals have evolved is the key to a truly sustainable agriculture, and to feeding the human population for the long run. Bloomer, Wisconsin, US
Design from data From David John Sherwin W. Brian Arthur and Robert Cailliau both made the argument on your pages that technology progresses through evolutionary mechanisms (22 August, p 26 and 19 September, p 27, respectively). However, it is part of the received wisdom in the field of reliability engineering that no new design is wholly revolutionary or wholly evolutionary. Rather, design is