Closed Registries And Ubermenschen
Irradiated by LabRat
Since I seem to have occupied most of my day with dog forum discussion, specifically as to closed registries in purebred dogs, I might as well adapt what I’ve spent my day actually writing given as I have no other ideas. Suffice to say this began as an argument over whether or not closed registries in kennel clubs are a good idea for purebred dogs. In almost all kennel clubs with a few exceptions, after a collection of dogs recognized by the breed club as being that breed is deemed sufficiently large, the registry is then closed and no dog not descended from those individuals will be recognized as being of that breed and acceptable to register or breed from with the club’s blessing. Roll that up with a question I was asked but never got around to answering because the answer was too long and complicated for IRC, and we get postfodder.
We’ve gone through some unfortunate periods in human history where someone thought it would be a bright idea to breed humans as selectively as some of us breed animals, in order to “improve” the human race overall. Those same periods of history tend to be marked by people pointing out this is a profoundly inhumane and unethical idea, occasionally with festive periods where the question goes to a shooting war, but it’s not often pointed out that it’s not only inhumane and unethical, but also a factually wrong idea that would not, even if eugenicists were given total control over human breeding, actually result in a better grade of human.
The first and most obvious reason is one I bring up every time I tear apart yet another bad sexual selection study, which is that the assumption any animal represents the “best” mate choice for the fitness of a potential mate, and animals choose among grades of partners for the best they can find to have them is inherently flawed. Fitness is survival and reproduction of children and grandchildren, and the definition of the most fit genes and gene combinations changes depending on future circumstances. The physically largest and most powerful bodies are great for intense intrasexual competition or defense, but terrible for famine conditions. A metabolism that hangs on to every calorie is fabulous for famine conditions, sometimes detrimental in times of plenty. “Best” is highly contextual and the future cannot be predicted, therefore natural populations usually feature a large variety of stable polymorphisms, or ways in which genes can vary; if “best” didn’t change often, natural populations would lose variety quickly as any sort of consistent direct selective pressure or advantage tends to have quite dramatic results.
The second reason lies in both the ways genes work and our ability to accurately identify what genes are doing what, and what traits are associated with genes and how. We can’t breed animals or people like we can build cars to do specific things, because we invented cars and build them from the ground up with a complete understanding of what each part does and how it works with other parts to have effects beyond that part’s direct function. We wouldn’t look at a car and point to the engine or wheels and identify it as the “speed part” because we know better and understand that a car’s potential for speed is an emergent property of the way its parts work as a system, but many people speak of, say, intelligence, as though it were as singular and granular as eye color. Intelligence is an observable and highly relevant trait to us, as speed is to a car, but we know very little as to where it actually comes from and what bits do what, let alone how to reliably breed for it as a trait. When we breed a dog for “working ability”, we’re actually throwing massive suites of genes together in hopes that the result will be as functional or moreso as the two original individuals, even though we have no idea how the “working ability” parts fit together or how they inherit and in what kinds of discrete units they inherit.
Further complicating things is the human tendency to think of DNA in general and genomes in particular as being like blueprints, because that’s an easy analogy that fits well with how we design and create complex things. It’s not really like that at all, however; no matter how much of individual gene sequences we come to understand, we will probably never be able to “read” someone’s DNA and be able to get a reliable picture of the corresponding individual. This is because genes interact with each other and with cues from the external environment constantly; they come with laundry lists of if-then conditionals. A gene is not like a part in a machine, but rather more like a worker in a factory, whose behavior changes based on the people around him, the conditions he’s working under, and a number of other factors.
To extend the analogy, possibly to torturous degree, let’s take a hypothetical factory worker and call him Gene. Under most conditions, Gene’s job doesn’t change much and he does his job in the same way, but if his co-worker Mary who is a better machinist than he is is there, he lets Mary do some jobs that he had been doing and maybe shifts his own focus to supporting Mary. If Bob is there Gene can slack off, because Bob makes Gene’s job completely redundant. If neither Bob, Mary, nor a long list of other co-workers are there and Gene is alone with his supervisor and his wife left him that week, Gene shoots the supervisor. Unfortunately, no one outside of the Analogy Factory can communicate with anyone within it, and the windows are only open on the second Sunday of years ending in “4”, so the odds are excellent that no one outside will ever know that Gene shot the supervisor or why the supervisor wasn’t being shot before, and in fact are only aware of the situation at all because of the chaos it causes.
This is how most genetic diseases work: they only express in the disease way under certain conditions relating to the rest of the genome they’re in, and even then often environmental pressures are also involved. Genetic diseases that work as simply as gene for blue eyes = blue eyes are selected out within a few generations, because direct selective pressure can apply to them. (The exceptions, like Huntington’s chorea, usually manage to survive because they don’t strike until after an individual’s breeding career is mostly over.) Most of the time, whatever deleterious way they can express doesn’t happen because they’re in a genetic environment that inhibits or doesn’t provoke it.
When you breed from a closed gene pool so that no variety beyond that which is initially present in a low number of selected individuals, every time you eliminate an individual from the gene pool, you eliminate a few of the environments and conditions under which a gene that has deleterious effects under conditions you can’t possibly guess can find itself. If a very fine working dog that exemplifies what people are breeding for is bred very widely and he contains a gene that does something horrible under certain circumstances, that seeds that particular gene around very widely along with whatever genes make him wonderful. As genetic diversity slowly narrows- and it always does in a closed system, it’s just a matter of how fast or slow- that gene gets more and more opportunities to express its Mr. Hyde side as the number of different conditions it can find itself in narrows. And if you ever *do* get the chance to find out which gene is doing it and under what conditions, your chance to either eliminate the gene or increase the number of genes in the population that can render it safe is long since past.
This is, incidentally, exactly the same reason why breeding for particular traits like canine working ability DOES work; you take genes that do specific things you want under certain conditions and raise the odds of them expressing in a way you’re aiming for by narrowing the range of conditions they can find themselves in. You get more disease and more instability by the exact same mechanism by which you get more capacity to work with a human shepherd or a better tracker- by artificially lowering genetic diversity. Further complicating the picture is the issue that genes can and usually do do more than one thing, and sometimes they can have a very useful Dr. Jekyll side to match their Mr. Hyde side; the same variation of the same gene, to choose an ironic example, may both predispose you to Alzheimer’s and enhance your memory before the disease sets in, which it may not anyway. (It also may not give you a great memory.) If you’re selecting for traits, you inevitably include some Jekyll/Hyde genes, and your ability to identify them usually comes only in hindsight.
You can’t produce supermen because there is no “best” that doesn’t change with circumstance, and you can’t even produce them by an artificially imposed definition because the flaws in your supermen will magnify by exactly the same mechanism as their enhanced strengths. You can only produce a more polarized gene pool, not a “better” one.
May 17th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
As far as genetic diseases go, there are some excellent bold-face examples in horses, that have actually been traced to specific bloodlines.
Hyperkalemic Periodic Paralysis (HYPP) causes severe muscle twitching and paralysis, which can be minor or cause the horse to be unusable… HYPP has been traced back to a single stallion, Impressive. Unfortunately, since Impressive was so damn impressive, his genes were, as you said, spread far and wide.
Hereditary Equine Regional Dermal Asthenia (HERDA) is even nastier. The layers of the skin are only loosely connected to each other, in severe cases a pat can peel the outer skin away from the deeper layers or the entire hide away from the muscle. Even mild cases are generally unrideable since the pressure of the saddle will tear the layers of skin apart. They’re not absolutely positive yet on the origination of the disease but it’s believed to have started in the Poco Bueno bloodline, another extremely popular line.
Even though AQHA isn’t exactly a closed registry, it does illustrate your point about passing on nasty stuff along with the good.
Another good illustration is what’s called the Lethal White gene which, as I understand it, shows up in several species. The lethal gene itself seems to be entangled in several other genes, including one that causes the animal to be white, and simply causes the baby animal to be stillborn or to die and be reabsorbed before they’re ever delivered.
May 17th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Reading and taking part in that other discussion - as I have in too many other places too many times before I’m just going to sing kum-bah-yah as my head explodes….
May 18th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Good post, with one minor disagreement… “occasionally with festive periods where the question goes to a shooting war,” Trust me, it’s NOT festive if YOU are in the middle of it, either by choice or by accident…
Also, if you ‘close’ the breed(s), you will increase the probability of increased inbreeding to the point of doing exactly the opposite by re-enforcing negatives, rather than positives…
May 18th, 2010 at 11:26 am
I wish I could make this compulsory reading for every advocate of closed registries who will not realize that even breeding for “GOOD” characteristics DIMINISHES GENETIC DIVERSITY AND INCREASES PROBLEMS. Period. Only biologists and about three dog breeders I know have ever gotten it. Hell, I should tattoo it on the inside of the breed nazi’s eyelids.
Do you know my tazis have been actively blocked from the saluki registry by a cabal of purists? That- diversifying the gene pool- was one of the reasons we brought them in. A few brave souls have bred to them (and “made” wonderful dogs) but they are as yet unregisterable, blocked from AKC events etc.
Will link. Still tired but partially because of an extremely ambitious weight training program, a new possibility in Parkinson’s therapy, and (mildly insanely) contemplating a new bird because I am not busy enough (joke). Hope to see you both before too long.
May 18th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
NFO: My tongue was way, waaaaaaay over in my cheek…. seriously, out of the lengthy list of stupid reasons humans have found to kill each other, it’s still king.
Steve: Yep, and believe me, I always have your dogs and your breeding ethics in mind when I’m writing about this subject. I’m glad to hear therapy is going well (I’m hearing nothing but good about strength training for Parkinson’s), and I definitely hope to be down there when possible.
May 18th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
As morally reprehensible as mandatory eugenics programs are, I think there is benefit in people being more aware of the chracteristics they’d like to pass on to their offspring. There’s also great potential for genetic engineering to improve our breed. Granted, we’re at a stage where we’d be flailing around almost-but-not-quite blindly at this point. But there are things abotu the human genome which could probably be improved.
The key would be to start and stay small: don’t get too ambitious, which is an admittedly difficult thing for humans to stick to. There are a few things which would probably not have too negative of a consequence were we to fix them genetically. Take the scotoma for instance. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision)) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotoma).
The problem is most of those things are probably not the sexy, noticable things most people would want to “fix”. They’d mostly be concerned with some fashion trend like blond hair and big boobs on skinny frames. On the other hand, I don’t really care if some people want to paint themselves and their offspring into an evolutionary corner. I think there’d be enough diversity of choices to overcome that should the environment change drastically, as well as the ability to make changes the other direction if need be.
But being a melanin-challenged American, I wouldn’t mind the ability to gift my kids some skin tones that are more protective against sunburn and melanoma. I think the ability to eliminate astygmatism would be worth the risks of whatever else that gene complex controls, and probably could eventually be fairly well fine-tuned to even narrower scope and less risk. Breeding is a very clumsy tool for this kind of thing, being so random. But genetic engineering MAY be able to overcome some of this with better precision, very soon.
May 19th, 2010 at 2:20 am
Part of the conceit of the closed registry system — and of all who inbreed, purge, and “purify” as a matter of faith — is a semi-conscious conviction on the part of the practitioners that they do now, and will forever continue to, exercise divine-type control over the environment in which their fancy critters will flourish.
Sure, if you are propagating colored mice in plastic tanks in the basement — you can engineer their physical environment to a remarkable degree for quite a few generations. Doing so while cossetting along an increasingly fragile and limited suite of genes is admired as skillfully husbandry by one’s peers. And when it all comes crashing down anyway, because of whatever factor(s) you had no feckin’ idea about in the interaction of the rodent’s genes (or Genes) with that environment which is not a closed system of five or six factors controlled by an omnipotent deity after all — well hell, you were bored with mouse shows anyway, model trains are cool, aren’t they?
The mice never got a vote.
Dogs — well, other people, and the dogs themselves, tend lately to make more intrusive assertions about their interests in the matter. Interests in living a normal lifespan, say, while mostly not being assaulted by one’s own innards.
At the moment, the fancy-mouse engineers have seized control of the canine institutions and are still using them to shut down the conversation and — very effectively — to effectively outlaw any rogue breeding practices that try to account for those interests of the animals and the humans who might actually need them to function as well as love them as individuals and wish the best for them.
I’m rather astonished that you even try to fight that battle with the Tazis.
It’s cheap and not too difficult to found a pedigree registry owned by like-minded members of a working dog club. (The man who wrote our breed registry’s custom dB software will give it to you if you are a working-dog club.) With the Victorian cynological institutions currently occupied with self-immolation, this is an auspicious time to get organized. With only a couple dozen humans buying in, you could quickly have a larger and more robust gene pool of functional dogs than the entire institutionalized fancy establishment can muster. And you have the advantage of not having created your own institutional barriers to using whatever is still good of their stuff.
May 19th, 2010 at 9:32 am
The problems of a closed registry are often exacerbated by the breeders….HYPP could be gotten rid of in a single generation if horses that carried the gene simply weren’t bred since the test for it exists, unfortunately they tend to be (as Farmgirl said) impressive in the show and sales rings.
Thoroughbreds are an interesting study of a closed registry. The original stock was a diverse, large group and the traits desired were fairly broad spectrum (speed, agility and stamina), there were no rewards for breeding type without performance. In fact, there was a certain ‘trial by fire’ aspect: stallions that couldn’t race long distances, carrying weight without breaking down, didn’t get bred to. In the last few decades, however, extreme inbreeding of a small subset within the closed registry has been combined with strong financial incentives to breed for a specific trait (how fast a two year old can run eight furlongs), and the otherwise beneficial fact of better vet care; not surprisingly, there are, as yet vague, concerns over the direction of the North American racing Tb type. However, other subsets in the closed registry are increasingly, if subtly, different.
May 19th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
FWIW, I never buy purebred dogs. I’m a mutt guy myself.
May 23rd, 2010 at 10:33 am
Just have to say one thing. Cross-breeding or out-breeding, whatever you want to call it, is not a magic bullet. Mutts end up with genetic disorders, too. If a genetically messed up dog is bred to a dog of the same breed or another breed it really doesn’t matter. Yes, you will get increased genetic diversity but problems can still occur. There was a fellow that bred golden doodles (golden retriever x poodle) near where I used to live. Charged 1500 dollars a pop for them. All nice cross-bred dogs. Most, if not all, were diagnosed with aggressive hip dysplasia by the age of two. I could list many other examples. My point is if you breed crap to crap, regardless of whether it a pure bred or not problems result.
Just a word on my dogs. I have two pure breds and a lurcher. I am not biased one way or another, just had to make the point.
May 23rd, 2010 at 11:24 am
Nope, cross-breeding in and of itself is not a panacea. Knowing someone whose random-bred god-knows-what mutt has hip and elbow dysplasia and thyroid problems would be enough to tell me that.
What it is, much like more traditional closed-registry targeted breeding itself, is another tool in the toolbox, and one that we’ll doom ourselves to an end-game population genetics mathematical scenario without.
I have two purebred dogs. Have not, in fact, ever actually owned a mutt. Breeding for type, temperament, and soundness is a good thing in my eyes- I just think the philosophy of closed registries is based on a Victorian understanding of genetics that eventually hurts those breeds, whether quickly or slowly.
May 24th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
We are well aware that cross-breeding is not a magic bullet in regards to genetic disease, but the degradation of the health of the purebred gene pool goes far, far beyond ‘genetic diseases.’ Join any breeding related dog mailing list and you will see, over and over again, bitches who cannot get pregnant without antibiotics or other invention, poor puppy survival, small litters, male dogs with no libido or no fertility, dogs that have persistent food or environmental allergies, etc. etc. etc. All of these are problems are associated with inbreeding, and yet they are kind of considered in a blase fashion by many breeders, just the order of business. There is no real push to find the reasons behind the problem. I encourage anyone who thinks that cross-breeding is just about ‘genetic disease’ to look the Major Histocompatiblity Complex and it’s role in the immune system. Dogs, as a population, have a wide variety of DLA (Dog Leukocyte Antigene) genes, but within a breed there tends to be only four or five very frequent DLA genes. Definitely more research needs to be done, but if your breed is suffering because it has a very limited variety of DLA genes, where are you going to go to get different genes into the pool? The answer you get from ‘purists’ is that maybe having a high rate of cancer is what it means to ‘be that breed.’ IOW, they’d rather breed dogs that have a high probability for getting sick, than cross-breed and at least try to see if greater diversity in the MHC will show an improvement. Sick.