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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> Biologists determined that not one of them was hatchery-born—they were all wild fish, whose robust natural paternity and hardy stream upbringing had given them a distinct advantage in surviving the return trip to Idaho. The hatchery fish were weaker, raised in tubs and selected from a narrow genetic slice that lowered their adaptability to a changing climate. Even though they outnumbered the natural-born salmon by millions, the failure rate in this case was so high that the vast sums of money spent in upper Idaho had not purchased a single hatchery success.

That's a pretty good metaphor for the cost of coddling our children that Jonathan Haidt goes on about. By valuing our offsprings' safety so highly we're effectively raising hatchlings in tubs, as opposed to wild fish gifted with a hardy stream upbringing.

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The success of the wild salmon isn’t just down to a “hardy upbringing”, though; it mostly comes down to the fact that, for every one wild adult salmon we see, there are thousands that died (probably by being eaten) as eggs or fry. That’s a huge selection pressure toward inclusive genetic fitness, such that genetic fitness in the wild population as a whole is maintained at a high level over generations.

I’m not sure there’s really a way to translate that effect to human beings in any ethical way, regardless of how you feel about safety. It’d go well beyond “not coddling.” (In fact, I’m not even sure if it’s possible for an apex predator to be R-selected. We’d likely have to do it ourselves, Battle Royale style.)

Genetic or upbringing? Not clear which is accounting for the Salmon study here

Well, if civilisation ever collapses, I guess we'd get something out of it

Unfortunately though, whatever natural selection that occurs in a post-civilization world is might be sort of orthogonal to improving human civilization when civilization returns.

We’d surely get some beastly hunter-gatherers out of the deal though :)

>I’m not sure there’s really a way to translate that effect to human beings in any ethical way, regardless of how you feel about safety.

It's unclear to me what you would want to select for. Being physically fit? Being smart? Being motivated? Being ethical? Being friendly?

It’s not clear at all. I think we’d instead select against undesirable traits. If intelligence and fitness are too varied to select for we could select against lack of intelligence or lack of physical fitness. Say I’ve had cancer at a young age I’m out but we can’t decide on body type. I can’t even imagine how to avoid antisocial behavior, which is fine since any attempt at this Is dystopian.

All of the above.

They are certainly fit to survive in the wild, but a farm is more likely to raise the Stephen Hawking of Salmon.

Fit is relative, and surviving well in the wild is just as arbitrary as surviving well in in s farmZ

Except you know humans aren't fish. It sounds obvious but the challenges and dynamics of being human are so different than those of being salmon that any similarities between the two can only be true in the most abstract sense. It's like reading a story about tasmanian devils and thinking: "That's a pretty good metaphor for how we're engaging in sex, we humans should start biting our partner's faces off before intercourse too". Even going by your analogy we would all be "hatchlings raised in tubs" by virtue of being social animals, there is no real equivalent to wild salmon because a human child left to their own in the wild would just die.

> raised in tubs and selected from a narrow genetic slice

I have volunteered at a large hatchery in BC, located near the headwaters of a small river. Every fall salmon are trapped next to the hatchery, their eggs & sperm are extracted for that year's batch, are mixed together, and the resulting fry are released in the spring.

So they aren't kept at the hatchery very long, and the genetic selection is limited to whatever made it back upstream.

At least down here in the PNW, hatcheries typically mark the fish they spawn by clipping their adipose fin when they are babies. When they return as adults and return to hatchery fish traps, they are sorted. The unmarked, unclipped native/wild-spawning fish are let back into the river to continue upstream. The hatchery fish are used for spawning the following years run. This creates a diminishing genetic pool and with time produces really measly, smaller and weaker fish with who knows what kind of genetic deficiencies. On some rivers, hatchery fish are trucked in from hatcheries located elsewhere and planted but never sorted on the way back in, assuming the bulk of the returning fish will be harvested by anglers.

Also, there's still the issue of genetic selection on the way out. The millions of fish that are spawned, raised in concrete pools and released back into the river have all been artificially selected to survive the extremely difficult first few months of life, which would naturally be the first genetic screening of the new generation.

NYtimes ran an article about “helicopter parents” and how much those type of parents did to coddle their children. Unfortunately, the conclusion was extremely clear, children raised with hyper focused protective parents succeeded far beyond their peers. It works.

Interestingly, by major, CS students are given the most financial assistance from their parents. I think there can be a naive suggestion that having parents willing to pay your SF rent and take care of details like who does your laundry allows for hyper focused work on complex, abstract problems. The idea of “not coddling” your children may be doing more harm than good in a economy which requires specialized work.

Alternatively, parents that can helicopter (let's make it a verb and an adjective, as well as a noun?) are likely parents from affluent backgrounds. Perhaps they have the resources in time, money, connections and location to be able to allow their children to be hyper focused.

Either by permitting their children to be entirely focused on studies, careers or both. At this point however we're not talking about helicopter parents, we're talking about privilege.

> the conclusion was extremely clear, children raised with hyper focused protective parents succeeded

By what metrics? An Ivy League student who requires their parents to intercede with their teachers versus a well adjusted state school student who takes care of themselves.

Depends on the definition of success. Yeah, by most measures I guess more money, prestige, and recognition is success. But I can’t take that hot house flower on a weekend backpacking trip. I mean, you’re right; I guess maybe I’m justifying my own lack of “success”. :-)

'selected from a narrow genetic slice' does not apply for the case you are talking about, so the metaphor doesn't fare well enough. As do all metaphors anyway.

Saying this is pretty ironic for salmons, they have a "stronger DNA" than wild fishes in several aspects

It's an interesting analogy, but I don't know if it points to anything actually truthful. Salmon are a very heavily r-selected species and humans are possibly one of the most k-selected species on Earth, made even more so with the invention of birth control. Of course we have different strategies in how we raise our children.

How would we know if all of these fish weren’t working as canon fodder?

That is, does the presence of weaker fish hinder or help the survivability of their stronger peers? Do disease vector and habitat pressures outweigh predation pressure?

> By valuing our offsprings' safety so highly we're effectively raising hatchlings in tubs, as opposed to wild fish gifted with a hardy stream upbringing.

How do you show this? The number of parameters leading to success is ludicrously high. Is there even a frailty in need of explaining? How about all the other environmental factors, like lack of the opportunity to invest in careers and cheap subsidized housing like our grandparents got? This sounds suspiciously like pop psych crap.

Well, it's kinda too late for that, as our species' winning survival strategy has been "have fewer offsprings, but value their lives so highly that they are well fed and trained to make further offsprings." It starts with giving birth to an underdeveloped infant that can't even hold its own head up, so that it will grow into a superior predator with a bigger brain.

Yes, and it's worth remembering that humans are the apex predator, planet-wide. There is nothing we can't hunt down and kill and eat and we don't even have natural predators anymore, not as such.

So it seems that our reproductive strategy of caring for your young has paid off way more than the salmons' one, of "tough love" for their offspring.

Humans are mammals. We evolved to take care of our young, unlike fish. All mammals do that, that's the whole point of carrying your young inside you and producing milk to feed them rather than making millions of them and letting them fend on their own.

You could say that mammals' reproductive strategy is exactly to coddle their young, in a sense. And it seems to work OK.

> The hatchery fish were weaker

Maybe this time... normally is the opposite

Ah, the smell of eugenics in the morning.

You're characterizing an appeal for wild, natural child raising -- as opposed to mono cultures raised in vats -- as eugenics? How isn't that backwards?

“natural child raising”—what, baiting your child with hyenas on the bayou? This is just a lame excuse to explain your kid when you could just accept responsibility.

I wonder if there is a vaccine effect there.

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