The invention of selective breeding was unbelievably late (2019)
gwern.net
gwern.net
These correspond to economic changes which made different sizes of animal more appropriate. Size and productivity aren’t the only criteria anyway – disease resistance, hardiness, or ease of feeding seem like they’d be just as important to subsistence farmers.
Earlier techniques may have been less good than modern ones, but they quite evidently worked to some extent. Specialized horse breeds had gotten to the point where they needed to be specially fed way before the start of the period in the book reviewed here!
Instead of positing a lack of understanding, the observed phenomenon is likely more a factor of limitations in documentary evidence (how many people engaged in stockbreeding were actually writing books anyway?) and in the actual goals of the people involved around optimizing for robustness and practicality over pure productiveness.
Yeah, I was thinking that a lot of this knowledge would have been kept secret as proprietary trade information.
In fact a quick glance at the Wikipedia page for medieval horse breeding shows documentation for quite deliberate, centralized, and successful operations quite far back! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages
Edit: And amusingly he does talk briefly about sheep but is not interested in where the types of sheep in 18th century England came from because the people who bred them did not leave records and get praised in a book on early modern history :)
If he reads the comments here, that's good, but I'm going to have to take everything he writes now as "X doesn't exist" to "I don't know about X, but people generally familiar with the field might"
Many medivalists suspect that monasteries and abbeys drove scientific agriculture in medieval Europe because they had capital, literacy, and education. Some berries seem to have been first domesticated in monastery gardens with nets to keep the birds out. Medieval people may not have had good theories of how to breed animals for traits but they could make it work with enough time and effort.
How many construction sites, workshops, factories, studios, etc have craftsmen passing along techniques that have never been formally described?
I know this type of science and discovery was much more prevalent in the 19th century when these undocumented practices were more common, but there must still be some and they must still be evolving.
I'm reminded of a talk I attended in school where a guest speaker from industry came in to describe the ideation aspects of industrial automation. The faculty were asking about all these cutting edge technology and management frameworks. The speaker replied that the most effective meta-tool they had for process improvement was a wiki that the assembly line workers could edit.
I am guilty of ruminating on the new hotness in SaaS apps alone at my computer when trying to come up with business ideas. I should just go out and talk to people!
For plants, taking them out of their natural environment with its co-occuring species, mycorrhizal networks, mineral composition and distributive species and sewing them by hand in a novel environment constitutes in itself a hugely genetically significant act. Even first-round seeds that germinate at all could show substantially different aggregate characteristics than those of the original wild population.
For animals, those that may be caught for raising are in all probability the children of less aggressive parents. Feeding over time will cause more domestication and the removal of environmental stressors that had maintained levels of fitness for the natural pressures and begin to change them instantly.
Both cases would only accelerate over generations, as it is a rare human who will later go and obtain seed or animals from the wild once a conveniently captive population is already available for breeding.
I've come to the conclusion that humans, in writing their own histories, frequently give themselves far too much credit. We would do well to consider ourselves more humbly.
Specialized breeds of dogs have also existed for a very long time.
This may be an accurate critique of the written science of animal breeding, and gives good examples of the reification of bad practices, but some techniques were obviously working over long periods of times whether they were recorded, or not.
What ultimately bothers me about it is the same things about the "discovery" of America. Ignorance that plant cultivation and ecosystem engineering was prevalent in the Americas (it wasn't a savage, untamed, wild land at all, but had been carefully cultivated).
And, in general, the idea that things didn't exist until written down by those in power.
> Inventors who lived in a neighborhood with a high per capita patent rate are themselves more likely to file a patent. Future inventors might correspond with their heroes (shades of the ‘college of letters’) and, if they then meet them in person, they are more likely to go on to innovate, even if it was only a single short meeting and the hero was in an entirely different field and so it is difficult to see what key fact, skill, or wealth/object they could have transmitted which might make any difference.
Conflating the credential with the skill (or here, the patent with the inventiveness).
On the other hand, the reproductive interactions of plants are less apparent.
From there I think its safe to say that our ancestors weren't the dullards they are often made out to be.
* eg, here bulls were evaluated on (among other things) muscling until very recently, whereas in the States bulls of the same race were already being evaluated solely upon how many litres their daughters produced. Moneyball with straws.
Edit: of course, if one is far from a (local) optimum, just about any breeding program will tend to produce improvements. It's only when one is so near to an optimum that most changes make things worse that one needs to get properly (statistically vs. optically?) selective...
Both are obviously true, so I don't see the need for back and forth about that.
And whatever side you fall on I think the claim by TFA is almost certainly false because it posits that the first definitive evidence we have of a theory and practice of selective breeding is in fact the first instance. Its crazy to think that's true.