Chromosomes getting pulled apart.
In a lecture titled Some Practical Problems of Immortality, game developer Ernest Adams tackles the issues of dealing with the notions of immortality we get from fiction.
He designates “Virtual Immortality” as:
By virtual immortality I mean those things that we tell ourselves to comfort us when faced with the prospect of our own deaths.
One type of virtual immortality is immortality through children. People who have children are often comforted by the fact that they’ve passed their genes on, that there will be someone who will remember them after they die.
The other type of virtual immortality is immortality through fame, through having done something that causes people to remember you.
The culture of dog breed is rife with both concepts. I suspect that breeders who inbreed to set a look that is so distinctive as to be a signature have a healthy dose of arrogance which puts ego before the dogs.
So too are the “show mills” and owners of the winning trial dogs who are severely over-bred. They do this for ego, not for the good of the breed. No one with the breed in mind would behave this way.
Jock Richardson didn’t have a crisis of conscience after he cashed the 10th check for studding out Wiston Cap and he didn’t quit after the 100th check. He cashed over 388 such checks and Wiston Cap sired over 1,900 registered puppies. I assume that the only thing that stopped Wiston Cap from impregnating as many bitches as possible year round until his death was probably a venereal disease that made him sterile. At some point nature says ENOUGH long before human-kind figures this out. His progeny stopped abruptly several years before his death.
Wiston Cap wasn’t in the dark ages, he lived in the 1970s and his owner died only 10 years ago. Would we praise a repeat performance today or would we condemn it?
No one owns “the breed” and altruism doesn’t exist, so individual ego, self aggrandizement, and desire for immortality through fame trumps the greater good. People whose greatest accomplishment in life is in their dogs do exist and asking them to take their last bow before they have to be dragged kicking and screaming, or in most cases whimpering, from the spotlight, is unseemly. We don’t criticize these people, we put their dogs on our logos and name awards after them. We give them glowing obituaries and make sure that any mention of the breed includes at least one or two homages to their dog. Everyone seems to know that Wiston Cap carried the gene for a red coat color, but no one seems to know that he also carried CEA.
This allowance for fame isn’t unique to the dog world. No one told Elvis or Madonna or Cher to shut the !@$% up and free up the airwaves for someone else. Instead we keep these geriatrics alive by indulging their countless reinventions, plastic surgery binges, and discounting the evidence of their actual death. Cher, I’m looking at you.
In sports we’ve humored the endless extension of Brett Favre’s career until he tried to prove his youth and hipster status by sexting pictures of his junk to a cheerleader.
In politics, we’ve watched Fidel Castro preside over Cuba while we in the US have seen fit to try on Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama for size.
We hear incessantly that “dogs are not children,” but we see the same vicarious immortality seeking behavior from breeders that we do from parents. “My lines” is code for “my family” and it’s clear that big breeders of all sorts are seeking to enshrine their kennel name in the breed.
Ironically in dogs, breeders who seek to permanently leave their mark on the breed more often hasten the breed’s demise than contribute to its “immortality.”
If breeders really wanted to lengthen the life of the breed, they’d behave in a manner which protects genetic diversity. But this is hard to do. But unlike inbreeding which enshrines a half-dog worth of genes in the breed, preserving diversity can also be seen as establishing a practical immortality. What is closer to immortality, having a bunch of half-versions running around or having your entire genome preserved across several offspring?
What would it take to achieve this practical immortality? For purpose of this exercise let’s define practical immortality as the quality of having so many children that 99.9% of your DNA is collectively preserved among them such that some future scientist could reconstruct a near clone of you from your DNA as it is preserved in your children. Not 99.9% in any one child, but a distributed copy.
How many children would you need to have to expect 99.9% retention of your DNA?
One child holds 50% of each parent, so if you only have one offspring, there’s 50% of your DNA out in the wild that could be used to reconstruct you. Now before you say that all you need is one more child to make 50% into 100%, remember that this would require the one in a bazillion chance that the two siblings would actually share no DNA. On average, siblings are 50% related so each new sibling only gives us half of what we’re still missing and the other half is likely repeated genes that we already have.
So, after capturing 50% in one child, we’d expect another 25% from a second child and another 12.5% in a third child. This quickly converges to over 90%, but capturing that last bit is hard. It takes 10 breeding offspring to capture 99.9% of the parent’s DNA.
Luckily, the tens of thousands of genes we have get mixed and passed on in a somewhat chunky manner, grouped together instead of perfectly and individually shuffled every time. That’s why certain traits become “linked,” even though they are different genes. If they are close together on the chromosome, they often travel together. This chunky mixing means that we’ll theoretically reach 100% which the mathematical model never does.
The lesson here is that preserving genetic diversity is hard. It requires a breeding ethic in which you don’t only select just one offspring from a parent to carry on the legacy. This isn’t hard for males, but few females have more than one significant offspring. Popular sires have no problem creating multiple distributed copies of themselves in the gene pool, but it’s a rare female who has 10 registered children who all have sustained lines.
We don’t have to breed 10 puppies from each litter though, as long as we have breed a diversity of puppies in the past. If a sire and dam both came from litters where just a few of their brothers and sisters were bred, the genetic diversity from the grandparent dogs will be preserved in those cousin lines and the need to preserve those genes in this litter is greatly diminished.
This is why preserving genetic diversity is a community endeavor. No single breeder can accomplish this. No line of dogs can be a universal outcross. No one litter can by itself can capture enough of the genome.
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You know I had to do something with this.
Thanks for posting!
retrieverman recently posted..The cultures of virtual immortality
I was astounded at the claims made with regard to immortality in a recent article: I believe the writer is himself attempting to achieve some kind of immortality by virtue of achieving some kind of notoriety through sensationalism. He writes some deflamatory comments about the late Jock Richardson and his wonderful dog, Wiston Cap: I feel this kind of personal attack defines an authors’ lack of dignity when they choose to attack someone who is no longer able to defend themselves. Had the author ever seen Mr Richardson work his dogs,or had he in fact witnessed at first hand the amazing amount of pleasure those who did see him work derived from merely watching an incredible partnership between a man and a working collie, then there might be some justification in some of the outrageous and ludicrous statements he makes in his article.
I did not see anyone who mated a bitch with Wiston Cap being carried, kicking and screaming into the darkest regions of The Scottish Borders? They choose to breed to Cap because they saw what anyone with an experienced eye could see: that here was an extraordinary animal displaying inherent qualities that could further enhance the already immense working talents of the Border Collie breed. These working attributes had been highly and carefully developed by generations of working shepherds and farmers throughout the UK and further afield who bred to Cap and his ancestors with one clear pre-requisite in mind: the PERFORMANCE of these dogs when working livestock, calmly and with authority—attributes that Wiston Cap displayed in abundance and attributes that he passed on to his sons and daughters.
If Cap was over-used, and that is debatable with the evidence of the bloodlines that he enhanced, and which can still be found in the best dogs of the current era, then it was certainly no fault of Jock Richardson’s. All Mr Richardson did was to work his dog, in much the same fashion that he worked him on the sheepwalks where he worked for a living, on every day of the year, but in a competitive arena. As long as men frequent this planet there will be men who will want to compete against each other–it is human nature–whether it be in athletics, boxing, horse racing or sheepdog trialling, men will always want to test themselves against the best that can be found. If Jock Richardson and Wiston Cap are to be pilloried by someone as inconsequential as the author of a report based on a lack of knowledge, who was evidently seeking some financial reward or possibly a means for establishing his own immortality, then I despair for those among us who attempt to articulate on the positive aspects of life with all its glories, downfalls, shortcomings and frailties.
We’re not talking about the dogs or the man. We’re talking about the system in which the man operated. He may have been a nice guy. The dog may have been good.
But the trial system meant that his genes wound up in too many of the successor generation, and that’s bad for breed health. No organism that reproduces with sexual reproduction is free from genetic disorders, even though most of these are not expressed when dealing with heterozygotes. When a huge proportion of a dog breed descend from a single dog, that makes the chance of getting genetic disorders much more likely– whether you are talking border collies or bulldogs or bullfinches.
If you peruse this blog, you can see how much of collie eye anomaly in border collies that Cap was responsible for. It has been calculated.
So you miss the point entirely and have decided to go into a defense of a dead man, when the issue isn’t him but the system he operated in.
retrieverman recently posted..January thaw