MugaSofer comments on The Psychological Diversity of Mankind - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 09 May 2010 05:53AM

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Comment author: AnnaSalamon 11 May 2010 01:33:46AM 3 points [-]

Your example of collie herding behavior is cool; I'm not sure what to make of that. Do wolves herd their pups? Or are there other plausible precedents? How complicated is collie "herding" behavior?

As to smell and tracking ability in blood hounds: given that these same abilities occur in wolves (though to a lesser extent?), my guess would be that these adaptations are relatively simple to acquire, if you have a wolf's genome as your starting point. Designing smell for the first time would be complicated, but designing a better sense of smell from a wolf's sense of smell might just require sending more brain cells to the "process smells" brain center, or building more of the kinds of olfactory receptors dogs already have, or some other simple shift. (OTOH, if blood hounds are sensitive to many compounds that wolves aren't sensitive to, or if they exhibit many strategies in tracking that wolves don't exhibit, I'd be wrong and surprised. Let me know if that's so.)

Comment author: MugaSofer 21 January 2013 11:05:45PM -1 points [-]

As to smell and tracking ability in blood hounds: given that these same abilities occur in wolves (though to a lesser extent?), my guess would be that these adaptations are relatively simple to acquire, if you have a wolf's genome as your starting point. Designing smell for the first time would be complicated, but designing a better sense of smell from a wolf's sense of smell might just require sending more brain cells to the "process smells" brain center, or building more of the kinds of olfactory receptors dogs already have, or some other simple shift.

It's worth noting that size and shape differences are unusually easy to get from wolves, something to do with unusually flexible genes for skeletal morphology in the womb IIRC.