On Sat, 03 May 2008 14:59:55 GMT, David Johnston <david@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>On Sat, 03 May 2008 10:36:06 -0400, Mark Stephen <mstephen@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>wrote:
>>Jon Schild wrote:
>>Not the same story, but in Jack Vance's _Dragon Masters_, humans and
>>aliens breed their captives selectively to produce weapons, draft
>>animals etc.
>>I'm a little surprised this idea never comes up in the interminable
>>evolution threads. I have three dogs, a border collie, an Irish
>>flat-coat retriever and a Great Pyrenees. They differ wildly in size,
>>appearance, temperament and intelligence, and these traits seem to have
>>been established in only a few generations. AFAIK, the only sf novel
>>with a cultural background which would allow this sort of
>>experimentation on humans by humans was _Iron Dream_, but is this sort
>>of selective breeding with humans actually impossible, or merely
>>unethical and kinda disgusting?
>Humans have ten times the generation length of dogs so you'd have to
>be patient.
There's no shortage of SF in which nominally human characters from
high-gravity worlds are genetically endowed with superhuman strength,
etc, on account of either natural evolution or selective breeding to
survive such an environment. Not that we ever actually see them do
such a thing; mostly we find them on normal-gravity worlds, beating
the crap out of the natives with their overdeveloped musculature.
Some of them are kind of vague on how long it took to arrange that
backstory, but it doesn't seem like millenia, or even terribly many
centuries.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
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