dimitrov@csd2.UUCP (Isaac Dimitrovsky) (05/29/85)
[] Lief Sorensen writes: > ... Anyway, did you know that > "natural selection" is Biblical? You can read about it in Genesis. When > Jacob went to live with his uncle Laban, he used "natural selection" > to improve his herd of sheep and cattle. Well, I've been pretty busy lately, but this was too interesting not to follow up. It turns out that Jacob was actually more of a Lamarckian. The relevant passages start from Genesis 30:25. I have tried to give a readable summary by paraphrasing from the Hebrew text, so this probably won't correspond too closely to English bibles. And after Rachel [one of Jacob's wives] gave birth to Joseph, Jacob said to Laban, "Send me away and let me go to my place and my country." ... And [Laban] said, "Name your wages [for Jacob's service up to then] and I will give you them." ... And Jacob said, "Don't give me anything but this one favor. Let me return and take care of your flock. I will go through your flock today and select all the dark sheep and all the spotted goats, and these will be my wages. And from now on, if you find among my flock a goat that is not spotted or a sheep that is not dark, you may consider it stolen." Laban agreed, and that day he separated the spotted goats, all that had any white in them, and the dark sheep, and entrusted them to his sons. He then put three days distance between himself and Jacob, leaving Jacob to take care of Laban's remaining flock. Jacob then took some sticks [I am not sure what the kinds of sticks are in English], and peeled strips from them, exposing the white inside of the sticks. He put these sticks in the water troughs opposite where the flock came to drink. And the flock conceived when they came to drink, opposite the sticks, and they gave birth to spotted young. ... And later, whenever the strong of the flock conceived, Jacob placed the sticks opposite them, but when the weak conceived he did not, so the strong went to Jacob and the weak to Laban [this is the only place that Jacob could be said to be using natural selection in any sense] It occurs to me, a natural explanation for this could be that spottiness is controlled by a recessive gene. If this were so, Jacob might get a small proportion of the goats to begin with, but they would all give birth to spotted offspring, while Laban's goats would contain some heterozygotes, so a certain percentage of their offspring would be spotted in each generation. Isaac Dimitrovsky