China Says it Cloned a Police Dog To Speed Up Training (xinhuanet.com) 116
A cloned dog, believed to be the first of the kind in China, has started training in Yunnan Province in a program to reduce the cost and time needed for training police dogs. From a report: Kunxun, a female of the Kunming wolfdog breed, was born on Dec. 19 last year in Beijing and arrived on March 5 for training at the Kunming Police Dog Base of the Ministry of Public Security. She was cloned from a 7-year-old female dog, known as Huahuangma, that has been in service in the city of Pu'er, Yunnan, by Sinogene, a Beijing-based biotechnology firm. The cloning is part of the ministry's research program.
Huahuangma played important roles in helping detectives with dozens of murder investigations, and was accredited the first-level merit in 2016, said Wan Jiusheng, an officer who is responsible for training Kunxun. Huahuangma's outstanding abilities as a police dog made her an eligible donor of genes, Wan said. "It takes four to five years to train a meritorious dog such as Huahuangma, and costs hundreds of thousands of yuan," he said. Police dogs serving in real tasks are not usually used for breeding. The cloning program helps researchers copy their excellent genes and reduces the time and costs needed for training, researchers familiar with the program said.
Huahuangma played important roles in helping detectives with dozens of murder investigations, and was accredited the first-level merit in 2016, said Wan Jiusheng, an officer who is responsible for training Kunxun. Huahuangma's outstanding abilities as a police dog made her an eligible donor of genes, Wan said. "It takes four to five years to train a meritorious dog such as Huahuangma, and costs hundreds of thousands of yuan," he said. Police dogs serving in real tasks are not usually used for breeding. The cloning program helps researchers copy their excellent genes and reduces the time and costs needed for training, researchers familiar with the program said.
Lamarc? (Score:1)
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That is how it works in Science Fiction.
Also in Science fiction they like to produce fully grown clones too. Not kids growing up in their sterile scientific environment.
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altered carbon for a modern refresh.
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Now find a way to scan a brain and then implant that on another brain and you might save 5 years of training. But unless the dogs had the exact same experience, all your saving is the burden of dogs who don't have the temperament for the job. You also miss out on the random chance that a change in genes might produce something better. I mean who would have thought a 100 years ago that you could send
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they would probably benefit more from changing dna to prolong the life of the comrade dog soldier
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So the training gets embedded in the DNA and transferred to the new generation?
Did you not read TFS?
She was cloned from a 7-year-old female dog, known as Huahuangma,
So in 2 years when the clone is full grown, the original dog will be 9 and probably getting too old. So they can just scoop out it's brain and put it into the clone. Instantly having 9 years of training and life experience in a 2 year old. It's a clone, so tissue rejection shouldn't be an issue either. Bonus points if they replace the skull with a clear gorilla glass cover and the larynx with a buzzy electronic sounding speaker.
Re: Lamarc? (Score:2)
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They've reduced the scale of the breeding program they need to manage. The clones can be drawn from the latest master branch, which need not be itself physically large enough to supply the entire force of police dogs.
I would like to see the numbers on this claim (Score:5, Insightful)
Nature vs Nurture argument is back here. If we clone a good police dog, but assume it will be cheaper to train, then they don't train it as well as it genetic predecessor, thus isn't as effective, and the high cost of cloning a dog.
We have identical twins, who have different personalities, and over time actually have some physical differences in appearance, (A little fatter or skinnier), Gone gray earlier, one needs glasses while the other doesn't, even their face structure can be different over time, just because they express emotions differently.
I don't see much advantage over cloning a good dog vs breeding a good dog with an other good one.
Re: I would like to see the numbers on this claim (Score:1)
South Korea already did this and have cloned dogs in service for a few years now. China is just trying to do the same.... but not yet successful like South Korea.
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The question is, do they taste the same?
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Nature vs Nurture argument is back here. If we clone a good police dog, but assume it will be cheaper to train, then they don't train it as well as it genetic predecessor, thus isn't as effective, and the high cost of cloning a dog.
Not, Nature vs Nurture. The premise here is Nature and Nurture.
By removing as much variance in the Nature part you don't have to handle as many special cases in the Nurture part.
I guess they hope to streamline the training into something where very little experience is needed and you just need to go through the documented process.
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It costs money to breed and most likely they'll be out of commission. Additionally, you don't get to pick the genes in a 'normal' birth, you can get random variations whereas this is more controlled.
It's an experiment after all, the question remains whether this was just good training of the dog or the dog's or the breed's natural ability.
On the other hand, we've been doing a form of gene-editing on wolves for hundreds of centuries, hence why we have so many dog breeds.
Re: I would like to see the numbers on this claim (Score:1)
What if I told you fatter or skinnier is at least in a non-irrelevant part a function about how much food you consume relative how much energy you use rather than genetics?
Also genes change and we have some memory of previous generations trauma.
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There is also factors on how people eat. There is a genetic factor to ones weight, we can see that by realizing how different people weight is distributed, not everyone gets fat the same way, and you will often see a trend that people who get fat one way, is often similar to the way their parents would put on weight.
For the Calories your Eat vs Burn argument, there is more factors, How many calories that go thru your system, unprocessed, and how much do you burn normally. Some people when they eat too much
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Is there, do you think, a Genetic component.,. that causes one, to write like, A Fucking retard?
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So there are differences between twins and clones.
Re: I would like to see the numbers on this claim (Score:2)
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To happen with no obvious detection by courts, lawyers.
Thats the special dog nations want.
The "alert" can then be used as the granted pretext for much more conversations and searching.
Probable cause that always works.
Am I missing something? (Score:5, Informative)
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A dog with a genetic good temperament, with the wrong trainer, could indeed change the temperament of such dog.
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but it may clone aptitude...
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Embryo transfer (Score:2)
It would be far better to use embryo transfer [drovers.com] to produce a few dozen puppies from selected parents. The mother wouldn't need to be retired because they can use surrogates to carry the pups.
Of course that assumes the female hasn't already been spayed, which has probably happened in this case.
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also, cloning is less random than sexual reproduction.
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There's a selection effect - the dogs that complete training and are demonstrated to be effective at their jobs are theoretically a preferable gene pool compated to a random population or even the population initially selected for training. Even better would be to focus on those dogs that excelled at the training or completed it faster than their peers.
With cloning, the dogs are not taken out of the workforce for breeding activities. Whether cloning technology is effective enough for it to be a better opt
Could be a tiny bit faster (Score:2)
I mostly agree the speed of training would not be impacted, a big advantage would be you'd have a police dog that should not wash out of the program.
There is actually one way in which training could be sped up though, trainers that had worked with the original dog would theoretically better understand what specific things helped motivate the dog. In that way they could take some shortcuts in training not having to fine tune the rewards they give.
I find it amusing though that Doom using repeated textures fo
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Well, I dunno, what if the dog in question was named Duncan Idaho?
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Just think, a police dog that could know where all the drugs everywhere are hidden...
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Mmm, sounds good. I'll have that with relish, and can I get some of that extra-melange Dijon mustard on as well?
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It'd still need to be a ghola rather than a simple clone.
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That depends heavily on the cloning process used. It's also relatively straightforward to restore telomere length in an organism with the use of telomerase - a technique explored for rejuvenation therapies, before being dismissed as ineffective. Turns out that very few of the normal symptoms of aging are due to telomere shortening.
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It takes four to five years to train a meritorious dog such as Huahuangma, and costs hundreds of thousands of yuan,
But if you start by cloning a meritorious dog to get good initial stock, you're seeding your meritocracy from the get-go. It only makes sense, right?
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It won't pass but some dogs are better and faster learners and that has genetic factors.
huh (Score:2)
So, I'm told all the time now that aptitude doesn't exist for humans, that anyone can learn anything, that genetics doesn't determine (or maybe even influence) who will come out on top for a skill.
But it exists for dogs?
Maybe we could measure what we are going for here ... we could call it DQ (Dog Quotient).
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Humans have all the same facilities, but may show up with different implementation. A little slower, a little faster.
The brain adjusts itself to reduce energy consumption in common tasks. Given similar environments, the brain will tend to adjust itself in similar ways. Put a slow kid and a fast kid in the same early learning environment and the slow kid will struggle more...at first. The brain will adjust to reduce the energy required for learning, and the slow kid will converge in learning speed with
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Citation? Because all the research I've seen suggests that genetics do in fact have a powerful role to play - the tabla-rasa bullshit was put to bed decades ago.
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Intersection of large bodies of research on human memory (enormous topic), learning (oddly not a very big topic compared to the specifics of memory), and development of expertise (K. Anders Ericsson, notably). Genetic variation has a huge impact; it's just not controlling.
Motivation has the heaviest role. Any non-damaged human brain can operate in a manner similar to any other non-damaged human brain: you have the same organoids with the same function. Think about it like having a heart, liver, lungs
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If you're talking about "I'm no good at math" mental ability, then sure - you're no good at math because you haven't practiced enough. Some people are predisposed to thinking in the ways necessary, but it's something anyone do if they put their mind to it.
But if you're trying to scale that up to "anybody could be an Einstein" - I find that extremely unlikely. The further outside the normal range you get, the bigger the impact of genetic predisposition. The brain is not infinitely plastic - and like muscl
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if you're trying to scale that up to "anybody could be an Einstein" - I find that extremely unlikely. The further outside the normal range you get, the bigger the impact of genetic predisposition. The brain is not infinitely plastic - and like muscle, there's a limit to how far you can push it.
Do you think people achieve the full of their potential at any time in their lives? That they can achieve no more and have hit the limits of their brain's plasticity?
K. Anders Ericsson describes the "Okay Plateau," where people cease to improve. You become a decent pianist, a decent typist, a decent computer programmer, but can't become better. Why? Because what you're doing is not inflicting pain, and you're not invested in success.
The first is a matter of negative reinforcement: if you play Go an
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>Do you think people achieve the full of their potential at any time in their lives? That they can achieve no more and have hit the limits of their brain's plasticity?
Not actually hit it - but it's not a limitless progression either. You converge on your maximum potential, so that further effort yields continuously diminishing returns. It perhaps takes as much effort to go from 80% to 85% of your maximum potential as it did to reach 80% in the first place. And of course you'e also fighting the natural
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deliberate practice is far older than Ericson, or even language. It's the way in which every predator learns to hunt for example.
Not really. Casual practice leads to a plateau when you're good enough. Consider drawing: you find a subject, you draw. You keep doing this, you improve.
With deliberate practice, you identify that you specifically have trouble with the details of eyes. The irises are always a bit off-center, the expressions are a bit off, and so forth. Instead of drawing faces or people again and again, you start drawing highly-detailed expressions, with focus on the eyes. You draw eyes again and again--but not jus
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He assumes that since all extraordinarily successful people had
a history of intense training, that anybody with the same training could have achieved as much.
What Ericsson fails to understand is that only those born with a high degree of innate talent can
make use of this intense training.
Anybody else would just use that time and effort to achieve a higher level of mediocrity.
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Where is this word "huckster" coming from? I've seen it recently to describe people like Larry Kudlow.
Being "born with a high degree of innate talent" seems to be a highly-coincidental process. When we pull people born from the dredges of muddled poor-people genes into an adoption agency and give them to rich folks, we somehow always catch the ones who somehow mutated high-talent genes. Likewise, those from a long line of highly-talented individuals who are put into a poor social environment with inade
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What numb-nuts told you that? Decades of nature-versus-nurture studies have pretty firmly established that *both* aspects have very powerful influence on the individual.
Assuming you haven't been listening to baseless New-Age bullshit, what you probably heard was that there's no *racial* correlation of aptitudes (with a very few exceptions, like resisting skin cancer) - which is simply a reflection of the fact that racial classifications are based on obvious superficial phenotypes rather than genotypes,
Implications outside police dogs (Score:2)
*By works, I mean produce an animal with the same physical abilities, temperament, and other genetic traits without any undesirable side effects of the cloning process. Obviously no one thinks the clones will come out of the womb pre-trained.
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Do you really think they aren't already doing this? You report on the cool dog clone, not the cool supersoldier clone...
Cloning Memories? (Score:2)
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Only if you're especially incompetent. Or do you think in-vitro fertilization techniques for humans require killing the woman in order to harvest her eggs?
Typically you just administer a drug that causes rampant ovulation. Kill the donor and all you get are ovaries full of immature eggs, which will need special care to become viable (I don't know if we even have the technology to do that), since normally they mature during the days before ovulation.
Verify, don't trust (Score:2)
First thing you learn about Chinese research claims is always go to the source and verify the proofs.
Why it may not be as good as it's predecessor (Score:2)
The cloned dog will be trained with the best, premier techniques thought to produce a great police dog. However, what experience had shown to be a great police dog (the DNA donor) might have been raised or trained in ways nobody documented because they did not follow the handbook. So the new dog, while genetically similar to the old one is trained in the officially mandated style of today - which won't necessarily give you another champion dog because the training is what they think is best, not necessari
Cloning Einstein? (Score:2)
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It has often been considered, and will probably be attempted once we have the technology to effectively clone humans, assuming someone has a cache of intact DNA.
Who didn't see that coming? (Score:2)
How long before china selects the most trainable soldiers for cloning?
I bet they're already planning for it.
Misinformation (Score:2)
I treat this like all "news" coming out of China: As misinformation or a downright lie to make it seem like China actually achieves things, which i highly doubt it does. See also the FUD stories about people injecting themselves with fruitjuice and other bullshit like that.