Dogs and Monsters (Stanley Coren)

April 15, 2009 at 9:50 am · Filed under Uncategorized

In an essay entitled “Dogs and Monsters,” Stanley Coren outlines the process of bioengineering dogs to adapt to the current technologies and needs of their human owners. He is currently a professor and director of the Human Neuropsychology and Perception Laboratory at the University of British Columbia.

Coren’s thesis is that the genetic manipulation of dogs over the past 14,000 years demonstrates just how old and harmless an idea bioengineering really is, despite the fears prevalent in media today.

The essay goes on to explain the significant stages of development in the process of breeding dogs. Wolves and jackals initially attracted to the food scraps lying around human camps were tolerated by the inhabitants for their habit of barking when predators or strangers approached. So useful were these barking dogs, that people began breeding the loudest barkers together to produce the ultimate watchdog.

We jump ahead to the end of the fifteenth century, when dogs began being used for hunting and cross-bred for desirable characteristics. Gun technology essentially determined which canine characteristics were most useful – ‘pointers’ (pointed at prey patiently and quietly) when difficult-to-load muskets were in vogue, setters (located prey quickly and indicated its proximity by tail-wagging) as weapons technology improved, and retrievers (bred to wait and retrieve only) as hunters began simply waiting for quarry to come to them. Pointers, setters, and retrievers became known as ‘gun dogs.’

We have genetically-engineered dogs over the past 14,000 years in order to increase their usefulness to us. As Thomas writes, “typically, humans had tailored machines to suit organisms. With dogs, they began modifying an organism to fit a machine [i.e. guns].”

I liked this essay – especially its title, ‘Dogs and Monsters.’ It draws attention to the stark contrast between the reality and perception of bioengineering (whether it’s food, animals, or people), something that needs to be done really. However, I’d be curious to know whether genetic engineering and selective breeding are really the same thing. Although Dr. Coren’s field isn’t genetics, his point is well-taken and refreshing. We need more scientists speaking up in defense of this issue to counter the ignorance that is being spread in the media, by the likes of Prince Charles (quoted as saying that genetic engineering “takes us into areas that should be left to God”) and other persons completely unqualified to give opinions on scientific matters.

Dogs and Monsters – Rhetorical Strategies

Coren unifies the introduction and conclusion of his essay in a way that enforces his thesis. The first line of the essay is “Today’s headlines routinely raise fears about genetic engineering,” but he finishes with the statement that 14,000 years of genetic manipulation of dogs has resulted in a “little white beast who is right now gently snoring with his head resting against my foot.” The danger and novelty of genetic engineering is effectively downplayed.

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To Err is Human (Lewis Thomas)

April 14, 2009 at 9:54 am · Filed under Uncategorized

In this short essay, physician Lewis Thomas explains how we can profit from our mistakes – especially if we trust human nature. Perhaps someday, he says, we can apply this same principle to the computer and magnify the advantages of these errors.

Thomas begins by contrasting the supposed infallibility of computers with the human propensity for error. Computers, while modeled on the human brain, do not ‘think’ or ‘dream’ in a human fashion. They are designed to be perfect – to compute. However, as we know from personal experience, computers do make mistakes. Thomas speculates that computer errors provide the same rich opportunites for learning that human errors do.

The expression “trial and error” is used to describe one way, the most important way according to Thomas, in which people learn. The essay draws an apt analogy between a laboratory and a computer – both are designed to run flawlessly and under strict controls, but often real discovery comes when a small error occurs. Unforeseen lines of thought open, and the human ‘faculty of wrongness’ pays off. Thomas goes so far as to label this “the highest of human endowments…if we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done.” When faced with a problem, our mind’s freedom to explore any myriad of possibilities, from the slighly wrong to the ridiculous, lifts us to new ground.

Animals (Thomas writes “the lower animals”) lack this freedom. Most animals are “limited to absolute infallibility.”  Fish, cats, and dogs rarely make mistakes – they act according to their nature. Thomas’ implicit suggestion is that this ‘infallibility’ accounts for the substantial gap between the problem-solving skills of humans and animals. I feel he is leaving too much unsaid. A more interesting and complete argument might explicitly hypothesize that a propensity for error increases in relation to a creature’s level of reasoning, with man’s obviously being the highest.  However, Thomas’s essay does clearly demonstrate the value of errors.

How could we use computers to magnify this value? Perhaps we need to program computers to make an infinite variation of mistakes on any given number of problems, and then comb the results for interesting and fruitful conclusions. We need to endow computers with an exploration process, which could only be modeled after human fallibility. Thomas writes that “if we had only a single center in our brains, capable of responding only when a correct decision was to be made (i.e. where computers are now), instead of the jumble of different, credulous, easily conned clusters of neurones that provide for being flung off into blind alleys, up trees, down dead ends, out into blue sky, along wrong turnings, around bends, we could only stay the way we are today, stuck fast.”

“To Err is Human”: Rhetorical Strategies

Thomas begins his essay with a list of experiences most of us have had at one time or another, with regard to computer errors. I found this to be an effective beginning because it inspires a sense of agreement with the writer right off the bat. Also, whenever a writer touches upon a pressing issue that affects us every day but about which we rarely talk (e.g. computer errors, traffic, etc.) we begin to feel a relationship with that writer, and to anticipate other thoughts or ideas we may have in common. This is a great way to control a reader’s feelings.

The points Thomas develops in the most detail are:

– Learning comes from being wrong.
– Being wrong comes from what we might call ‘exploration.’
– Through computers, we may be able to magnify the benefits of being wrong.

Central to his main idea, he develops these points most thoroughly.

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