mlevin@jade.tufts.edu (Mike Levin) (05/01/91)
Does anyone remember (can give me a reference to) a paper that described the following experiment: you take a bunch of mice, run them through a maze, until they learn it, then take the stupidest mice, breed them, and keep doing it over and over again, always selecting for the stupidest mice. I think this particular experiment went on for several years. Anyways, it originally started out as an experiment to show inheritance of acquired characteristics, but what they found was that even though they kept selecting for the stupidest mice, the overall speed of maze running (the mice's intelligence, as measured here) went singificantly *up* over the course of the experiment. Has anyone read this paper? Any criticisms of it? Any ideas on what could be going on in such a case, provided the study was well done? Mike Levin