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Pfft comments on Stupid Questions August 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Grothor 01 August 2015 11:08PM

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Comment author: Evan_Gaensbauer 03 August 2015 01:38:20AM 3 points [-]

Bonus Stupid Question

I remember reading about how some biologists took some wild foxes, and allowed ones which were friendlier to humans to breed. In the next generation of fox offspring, they let the friendliest ones of those litters reproduce. They repeated this several times. After some number of generations, they found these friendliest of foxes had droopy ears like domesticated dogs. This demonstrates how a simple process of artificial selection, like just selecting for friendlier animal companions, may have been sufficient to lead to the domestication of dogs.

Now, my question is, could we humans do the same thing with octopi? Could we just take a population of octopi, and identify the ones which can meaningfully interact with humans in a friendly and docile way, and let them breed, and iterate this process until we have some kind of domesticated octopi?

If they're not long-lived, they wouldn't make good work animals, but I want to know if octopi could at all be domesticated regardless. The fact they're short-lived might mean humans could breed domesticated octopi even faster.

Comment author: Pfft 03 August 2015 11:13:59PM 1 point [-]

I would imagine that using foxes give you a lot more to work with though. Foxes in nature live in pairs or small groups. The children stay around the parent for a long time. So they already have mechanisms in place for social behaviours. (And even if they are not expressed, there probably are some latent possibilities shared among mammals? E.g. this article about the evolution of housecats notes that they independently evolved a lot of the same behaviours that lion prides use to socialise, even though wildcats are solitary.)