[Taxacom] "Enculturalization" in apes, dogs, and birds

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 2/10/2011 11:13 AM, Curtis Clark wrote:
> On 2011-02-09 20:57, Kenneth Kinman wrote:
>>         Interesting, but it seems to me that one should have easily
>> predicted such a result.  Human babies have been enculturized for
>> hundreds of thousand (if not millions) of years, and even domesticated
>> dogs for many thousand of years.
>
> What you write makes no sense. Enculturation does not affect the germ
> plasm, and must be done anew every generation.

* but the matter under discussion is Dogs knowing to look for food where 
a person has pointed -- shall we estimate 10,000 generations in which a 
Dog that didn't respond in this way would have been both hungry and 
excluded from the preferred breeding pool as a dummy? Anyone who has 
lived with Dogs of diverse breeds must be jaw-droppingly impressed by 
the selective modifications in their behaviour for the tasks they were 
bred to do, and scrounging around for scraps is one of the first tasks 
of domestication, second only to not biting babies.

Notice also the recent selection to not chew on electrical cords nor to 
chase motor vehicles.

fred.
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          Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
now in the field on the Thirty Years Later Expedition -
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     RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
   on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
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