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[RT][WIP][HSF] Set In Stone: Follower Chapter 28 Rational Stonepunk
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Author: u/Farmerbob1 Level 1 author*
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URL: https://setinstonestory.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/chapter-28/
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Score: 15
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Created: 2015-09-24T09:50:33
Post:
Comments:
u/Shadowlost8 [+3] (5 hours later)
This was my favourite chapter yet. Please tell me you're doing a follow-up to this after the epilogue.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (6 hours later)
I'm not done in this universe, but I will be taking a break from it to edit other works and write another book in a different universe.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+3] Mouse Army (11 hours later)
Is anybody else annoyed that for thousands of generations of breeding swine they only have dog-intelligent swine?
Breeding works much faster than that.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (13 hours later)
Well, we've been breeding dogs for thousands of generations, and they are only as smart as dogs. Swine started from a lower point.
Not trying to be snarky here. Pigs really aren't that smart. They are fantastically successful survivors though, and if a trainer knows what they are doing, they can certainly use hardwired pig instincts to train.
Pigs have big heads, but their brains are really tiny, and a lot of the brain is devoted to sense of smell. Their heads are so big because they use their noses as shovels and prybars.
One of the most important sources of my information about pigs was the Sugar Mountain Farm blog. Walter and his family are a pasture-raised pig farming operation. No crating. The pigs eat almost exclusively grass and whey. They aren't castrated or fed antibiotics, or any supplements unless they are actually required for the health of the animals in the case of injury or poor health.
If you want to see a rational pig farmer in operation, check out Sugar Mountain Farm. It's well worth the time to go there and poke through over ten years of blogs to see the frankly incredible journey that the family has gone through, and if you're interested, you can learn a huge amount about pigs while you're at it.
This has morphed into a pretty big shout-out to Sugar Mountain Farm. I'll say that I have no commercial relationship with them, other than a link directing people to their website, in exchange for the incredible wealth of information about pigs that I've found there.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+1] Mouse Army (14 hours later)
Well, my point is kinda that for the first few thousands of years nobody knew what they were doing in breeding, and you had to keep a general fitness level amongst your specimen.
Once humanity understood what they were doing, so in the last 200 years or so, desirable traits amongst species that are competitively bred have risen enourmously.
Milk production per cow has gone from slightly less than 5000lbs/cow/year to far above 20000 lbs/cow/year in 80 years.
Weight of broilers has gone from 2.5 to 6.2 pounds in the same 80 years.
For wheat I find numbers for (cannot find correct english words) number of grains planted vs earned: a multiplicator of 3 in 1500, and 25 nowadays.
And all those are just a single metric that has improved cosiderably, all the other performance measures have also improved similarly! (grains are heavier by far, cows give milk longer, broilers reach the far higher weight much faster etc).
Now one might argue that intelligence is more complicated to measure than milk mass or is even a more complex characteristic to breed for, but ...
The single most intelligent dog breed - the border collie- wiki has these powerful sentences to say:
All pure Border Collies alive today can trace an ancestral line back to Old Hemp. Old Hemp, a tricolor dog, was born in Northumberland in September 1893 and died in May 1901.
One hundred years! A single intelligent individual makes the difference in "most intelligent dog breed!"
If one were to actually breed swine for only 200 years - let alone a few thousand!- with a singular focus on Intelligence, with modern breedings methods- you surely would get far more intelligent swine than you depict.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (15 hours later)
I don't know enough about genetics to make a scientific argument, but I can make an anecdotal one.
There have been a great many remarkably smart dogs in the world, and I'd be utterly amazed if they hadn't been bred to each other very frequently to try and consolidate intelligence genes. We still haven't seen dogs get beyond recognizably doglike intelligence. None of them are reading Shakespeare or doing algebra yet.
I suspect that human intelligence was not a simple refinement of existing capabilities. It was likely a random mutation that managed to pass Darwin's fitness testing. Our brains worked a certain way for hundreds of thousands of years until a child was born with a subtle mutation that did not prevent them from surviving long enough to breed, AND did not render them sterile. They passed on the genes, and from there on, the ball started rolling. A single individual can indeed make a huge difference.
My layman's understanding of genetics is basically that Allen's family have pretty much brought their swine to the pinnacle of swinish intelligence that is possible without a game-changing mutation. Game-changing mutations that survive to adulthood are rare. In the case of the Rickson family swine, many potentially brilliant piglets might have been conceived, but not survived to be born due to defects. If any mental mutations were born, they may have been sickly or weak, and not survived long. For a random mutation to happen in a benevolent fashion is rare. For it to happen in the benevolent fashion that would increase a specific desired trait is fantastically rare. For the animal with the random benevolent trait that you wanted to also be capable of having offspring would be yet another limiting factor.
shrug I can't go beyond the anecdotal here, but if someone with more-than-journeyman genetic knowledge can address this in journeyman terms, on either side, I'd be interested in hearing more thoughts.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+4] Mouse Army (a day later)
pretty much brought their swine to the pinnacle of swinish intelligence that is possible without a game-changing mutation
While I can see the point of this, I seriously doubt it. Evidence points in the other direction. There are many loci in the genome who have a small influence on intelligence, and every single one can be flipped at once, due to chance or breeding. Thus we get humans that are several standard deviations smarter then average.
Given that we also have a number of individual animals that are able to converse with humans, with "random/chance" intelligence, in the relatively small sample of animals that ever were in human captivity where they cared about intelligence, a focused breeding progamm would very quickly flip all these loci.
They are already inbuilt, and dont need an exceptional individual to emerge.
Thousands of years of breeding, and your swine are still very recognizable swine! In that time you can mould a species so completely as be completely unrecognizable. Your "intelligence bred swine" don't sound smarter by much than any standard truffle pig in France!
We have speciation in 250 years of mouse population on the faroer islands!
There is a paper out there though I cant find it right now- they do an estimation of theoretical limits of oil content of some seed based on genes that can code for more/less oil content. And IIRC they find something like 40 standard deviations as the limit...
I think -without being a domain expert- that you severly underestimate the power and speed of breeding progams and natural evolution.
But to be fair, it is a relatively minor nitpick that only matters since I am a stickler for this kind of consistency and doesnt matter at all to the story.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (5 hours later)
Pushing them towards One World Government?
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (6 hours later)
They could have had that long ago, if Albert had allowed it. He intentionally prevented federalization, choosing instead to maintain a series of city states like ancient Greece.
A monolithic government codifies how people react to one another, and Albert doesn't want that, it would make it harder for him to judge progress towards his goals. At least in this book.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (7 hours later)
But now he's pushing them towards it.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (9 hours later)
More on that in the epilogue.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (3 minutes later)
Whew. Big chapter. It should have been two chapters, really, but the muse kept bouncing me back and forth between sections.
This is the culmination, the next chapter will be an epilogue.
I would really appreciate commentary on this chapter, either here or on the blog.
u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (4 hours later)
the next chapter will be an epilogue.
Does that mean set in stone is ending, or is this just the end of one book?
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (6 hours later)
Ending for now. My writing has improved to the point where I feel I can publish my work, so I have six novels worth of work to edit and publish.
I have another story partly planned out for Allen, but before that, I'll be writing in a different world.
u/traverseda [+2] With dread but cautious optimism (6 hours later)
Post it here
u/gommm [+2] (12 hours later)
Oh, looking forward to your new story but I'm definitely going to miss Set In Stone.... It's by far my favorite of your work.
By the way, please post any book you publish here, I'll be happy to buy it :-)