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Daniel's Reviews > Fowl Play: A History of the Chicken from Dinosaur to Dinner Plate
Fowl Play: A History of the Chicken from Dinosaur to Dinner Plate
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Fowl Play: A History of the Chicken from Dinosaur to Dinner Plate (2022) by Sally Coulthard provides of a mix of fascinating science and soporific cultural trivia relating to Earth's most industrialized bird. The odds are that many of us owe our lives to the humble chicken, and not just because they feed us but because their eggs have served as growing media for viruses used to create numerous vaccines against deadly diseases. Vaccines, of course, are the most successful medical intervention in history, having saved millions of lives directly as well as indirectly via the creation of herd immunity. (Although, notably, chicken eggs aren't part of making vaccines against COVID-19, we are reminded in footnote 8 of Chapter 8.)
The author certainly did her research, as the extensive footnotes indicate. She's either an insomniac or she reacts differently to soporific cultural trivia than I do. It's somewhat interesting to read about all the ridiculous things people believed about chickens and witchcraft in the past, but it's hard to see any relevance to anything that matters. And plenty matters today, such as the current set of ridiculous things people believe.
One of those ridiculous things, often fashionable among the sorts of people who write and read books such as this one, is that despite the clear evidence from chickens and all other domestic animals that DNA influences both physical traits and behavior, somehow none of this could apply in any socially or economically significant way to humans. That is, Nature must share our egalitarian values, so evolution will have insured that all the different population groups of humans around the world arrived at this present moment equally endowed with all the genetic variants necessary for success in the 21st century. Despite the extreme novelty of modern environments, evolution must have seen this moment coming and made sure to equip all of us equally for it. Therefore, any differences in average outcomes between groups must be entirely down to environmental influences, especially racism, sexism, and all the other -isms. Coulthard disparages (Chapter 6) the eugenicist ideas of Charles Davenport (1866�1944), which reminds me of Young Earth Creationists cherrypicking paleontological errors from the same period (e.g., ) as evidence that "evolutionists" today don't know what they're talking about. Never mind that science in general seems to have made some headway in the last 100 years, resulting in some improvements to various technologies like the telephone for starters. Someone who doesn't like a field of science ought to honestly engage with its current version. Who knows, maybe the scientists in that field learned something from its past mistakes.
We shouldn't be surprised that Davenport might have gotten a few things wrong, as his eugenic speculations occurred years before anyone understood in detail what a gene was. But now science has given us powerful tools, such as (GWAS), which create the possibility of actually testing the hunches of people like Davenport instead of lazily vilifying them. But do you think anyone is going to propose, much less win funding for, any study that might have the possibility of disturbing anyone's comforting ? It seems unlikely that any promising young geneticist would want to ruin his, her, or their career by discovering prohibited truths, when there are so many less controversial problems to address. Such as, for example, finding treatments or cures for the 6,000+ known (few or none of which, by the way, distribute equally among the world's population groups, so Nature's respect for egalitarian ideals is demonstrably lacking there). Thus the final resolution of the great will have to wait. In the meantime, and well before anyone has actually checked, Coulthard seems to have placed all her chips on the socially acceptable bet, namely that none of the persistent average outcome differences between population groups can have anything to do with differences in the distributions of genetic material.
A measure of whether people understand a problem is their success in solving it. The same kinds of social, behavioral, and economic disparities that Davenport studied a century ago are still with us. We may fancy ourselves as far more enlightened today, but where's the beef? If we understand the environmental influences on social outcomes, we ought to be able to create environmental interventions that produce better outcomes, perhaps even equal outcomes, if not for everybody then at least for study groups receiving targeted interventions. As Russell T. Warne reports in the book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, the track record of such intervention programs is not great. In particular, there is a peculiar "fade-out" effect, with some interventions showing improvements in children that fade out by adulthood. That's something to bear in mind, by the way, when you hear about the latest balleyhooed educational method.
The author certainly did her research, as the extensive footnotes indicate. She's either an insomniac or she reacts differently to soporific cultural trivia than I do. It's somewhat interesting to read about all the ridiculous things people believed about chickens and witchcraft in the past, but it's hard to see any relevance to anything that matters. And plenty matters today, such as the current set of ridiculous things people believe.
One of those ridiculous things, often fashionable among the sorts of people who write and read books such as this one, is that despite the clear evidence from chickens and all other domestic animals that DNA influences both physical traits and behavior, somehow none of this could apply in any socially or economically significant way to humans. That is, Nature must share our egalitarian values, so evolution will have insured that all the different population groups of humans around the world arrived at this present moment equally endowed with all the genetic variants necessary for success in the 21st century. Despite the extreme novelty of modern environments, evolution must have seen this moment coming and made sure to equip all of us equally for it. Therefore, any differences in average outcomes between groups must be entirely down to environmental influences, especially racism, sexism, and all the other -isms. Coulthard disparages (Chapter 6) the eugenicist ideas of Charles Davenport (1866�1944), which reminds me of Young Earth Creationists cherrypicking paleontological errors from the same period (e.g., ) as evidence that "evolutionists" today don't know what they're talking about. Never mind that science in general seems to have made some headway in the last 100 years, resulting in some improvements to various technologies like the telephone for starters. Someone who doesn't like a field of science ought to honestly engage with its current version. Who knows, maybe the scientists in that field learned something from its past mistakes.
We shouldn't be surprised that Davenport might have gotten a few things wrong, as his eugenic speculations occurred years before anyone understood in detail what a gene was. But now science has given us powerful tools, such as (GWAS), which create the possibility of actually testing the hunches of people like Davenport instead of lazily vilifying them. But do you think anyone is going to propose, much less win funding for, any study that might have the possibility of disturbing anyone's comforting ? It seems unlikely that any promising young geneticist would want to ruin his, her, or their career by discovering prohibited truths, when there are so many less controversial problems to address. Such as, for example, finding treatments or cures for the 6,000+ known (few or none of which, by the way, distribute equally among the world's population groups, so Nature's respect for egalitarian ideals is demonstrably lacking there). Thus the final resolution of the great will have to wait. In the meantime, and well before anyone has actually checked, Coulthard seems to have placed all her chips on the socially acceptable bet, namely that none of the persistent average outcome differences between population groups can have anything to do with differences in the distributions of genetic material.
A measure of whether people understand a problem is their success in solving it. The same kinds of social, behavioral, and economic disparities that Davenport studied a century ago are still with us. We may fancy ourselves as far more enlightened today, but where's the beef? If we understand the environmental influences on social outcomes, we ought to be able to create environmental interventions that produce better outcomes, perhaps even equal outcomes, if not for everybody then at least for study groups receiving targeted interventions. As Russell T. Warne reports in the book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, the track record of such intervention programs is not great. In particular, there is a peculiar "fade-out" effect, with some interventions showing improvements in children that fade out by adulthood. That's something to bear in mind, by the way, when you hear about the latest balleyhooed educational method.
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