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[Skullsploder]

Thread long dead, I bid thee, RETURN TO LIFE.

Yeah so I've finally got to a pc and slaughtered all 69 of my useless turkeys and poults. I left 3 breeding pairs alive, comprised of the 2 strongest, the 2 weakest, and the 2 median strength turkeys. Descriptions are as follows (with strength values according to Dwarf Therapist):

Weak
235/1251 She is gigantic yet incredibly weak
329/1346 He is enormous yet very weak

Control
993/2014 She is gigantic
1025/2078 He has an enormous build but is very skinny

Strong
1835/3698 She is gigantic with incredible muscles
1854/3736 He is gigantic with incredible muscles

The pairs are isolated in 2*2 chambers so that there is no time when the male is too far away to fertilise the eggs. There is a cage associated with each of the three chambers into which all the poults for each chamber are respectively stuffed.

I will report back as soon as the first hatchings occur.

[TheHossofMoss]

Thread long dead, I bid thee, RETURN TO LIFE.

Yeah so I've finally got to a pc and slaughtered all 69 of my useless turkeys and poults. I left 3 breeding pairs alive, comprised of the 2 strongest, the 2 weakest, and the 2 median strength turkeys. Descriptions are as follows (with strength values according to Dwarf Therapist):

Weak
235/1251 She is gigantic yet incredibly weak
329/1346 He is enormous yet very weak

Control
993/2014 She is gigantic
1025/2078 He has an enormous build but is very skinny

Strong
1835/3698 She is gigantic with incredible muscles
1854/3736 He is gigantic with incredible muscles

The pairs are isolated in 2*2 chambers so that there is no time when the male is too far away to fertilise the eggs. There is a cage associated with each of the three chambers into which all the poults for each chamber are respectively stuffed.

I will report back as soon as the first hatchings occur.

Welcome back, sir/madam.
We shall await your glorious !!SCIENCE!!

[taptap]

From the weird / unround numbers, it is obvious you had attribute rust. For better science, I would work with attributes that do not change. (Recuperation, disease resistance)

[Skullsploder]

From the weird / unround numbers, it is obvious you had attribute rust. For better science, I would work with attributes that do not change. (Recuperation, disease resistance)

If you take a look in therapist at any animal or dwarf's disease resistance attribute, you'll notice the values are just as unround. These numbers are randomly generated for each animal at birth. Also AFAIK attributes never rust; only skills do (although dwarves can pack on fat if they don't burn it off).

EDIT: almost forgot to mention, my control group has finally laid some eggs. The strong and weak groups are still not laying.

[taptap]

If you take a look in therapist at any animal or dwarf's disease resistance attribute, you'll notice the values are just as unround. These numbers are randomly generated for each animal at birth. Also AFAIK attributes never rust; only skills do (although dwarves can pack on fat if they don't burn it off).

No. Check your numbers and look at the difference between max and current values.

Disease resistance / recuperation are max/2 if max > 2000 and else max-1000 rather consistently. Attributes like strength start similarly at birth, but rust at a rate of about 10 per year. (Only livestock with different rust rate in my fort are my cave crawlers, but they have seen a period of intense fighting, injuries and healing.)

[Dwarf4Explosives]

PTW.

[IndigoFenix]

Has anyone considered using modded creatures to test whether or not inheritance is a thing?

Make a creature with extremely diverse sizes and shapes (you can do this by modifying the maximum and minimum values for height, length, and broadness) and physical attributes (strength being the most visible for animals, since muscularity is in the description), a short childhood, and large litter sizes.  (It should still have some childhood, because if it is born mature it may mate with one of its siblings at the moment of birth).  Then it should be very easy to tell whether or not there is a change going on.

You can also modify dwarves (making them mature quickly, have great diversity, large littersizes, and be all heterosexual, and maybe mod their personalities to have high love propensity so they get married easily) in order to test eugenics on civilized creatures.

[Dwarf4Explosives]

You probably also need to mess around with tags to stop attribute change through training.

[Skullsploder]

If you take a look in therapist at any animal or dwarf's disease resistance attribute, you'll notice the values are just as unround. These numbers are randomly generated for each animal at birth. Also AFAIK attributes never rust; only skills do (although dwarves can pack on fat if they don't burn it off).

No. Check your numbers and look at the difference between max and current values.

Disease resistance / recuperation are max/2 if max > 2000 and else max-1000 rather consistently. Attributes like strength start similarly at birth, but rust at a rate of about 10 per year. (Only livestock with different rust rate in my fort are my cave crawlers, but they have seen a period of intense fighting, injuries and healing.)

Huh, thanks for that. That's very good to know. When my population of cows or turkeys or whatever gets large enough to see a serious range of diversity in disease resistance, I'll start selectively breeding them in the same way. But I don't feel that the rust is enough to derail the experiment, as the largest deviation from the rule you gave comes to less than 7% rust off the original attribute value, and that's on the weakest turkey anyway. But yes for a purer experiment, disease resistance will be tested in the futute.

As to testing on modded creatures, I have considered that, but I don't get to play DF enough that I'm willing to start a dump fort purely to test this. The experiment essentially runs on its own in a heavily locked subsection of the fortress while I play and have fun. And since I'm trying to play quite stringently exploit-free, it wouldn't do to have chickenroaches running around.

Update: all the hens but the strong one have laid eggs.

It is possible that selective breeding could be confirmed from this single generation: if every single one of the strong poults has significantly higher stats than the weak and control poults, it will be a pretty clear indication.

The logical next step would be to test for Lamarckian genetics (passing on attributes gained during life). Any tips on how to do that? I can't think of a way to test that without modding, as animals can't be safely made to exercise and dwarves are too prone to celibacy.

One last question: is there any way to give nicknames to livestock? It would make assigning animals and organising results much easier.

[Bumber]

One last question: is there any way to give nicknames to livestock? It would make assigning animals and organising results much easier.

Only with dfhack. Maybe Dwarf Therapist.

[Skullsploder]

Some results!
The control group has given me 11 poults (yay). Here follows their strength attributes:

916/1916
836/1836
1020/2040
1078/2156
1166/2332
1051/2102
919/1919
538/1538
1102/2204
348/1348
1624/3428

(I'm not gonna waste time copying out all their descriptions)
I think we can safely ignore the actual strength values and look solely at the cap. Taptap that rule you gave isn't mentioned on the wiki as far as I can tell, but it certainly should be, because it appears to be absolutely bang-on. Now let's compare these stats with the parents':

2014 and 2078; average out to 2046.

The greatest variance from that upwards is 3428, difference 1382 or 67,55%
The greatest variance from that downwards is 1348, difference 698 or 34,12%

The average strength cap for the poults is 2074,45
Difference between child and parent strength cap averages is 12,45 strength units (not percentage) or 0.61%

So despite some fairly far-flung outliers, we see an incredibly close correlation in the overall strength caps of the litter with the strength caps of the parents. However, I'm not so certain as to what the racial median strength for turkeys is. Would anyone care to enlighten me? The wiki was uninformative.

Also I figured out my issue with the strong group not laying eggs: a pet had claimed the nest box telepathically. I've now pastured all other egg layers I couldn't easily slaughter in a room with plenty of nest boxes, and dumped the eggs a blue peafowl managed to lay in the weak groups box (despite the door being tightly closed :/ )

[Eldin00]

The rule which causes the behavior noted by Taptap (and confirmed in your test) is that the maximum of an attribute is the higher of Starting value * 2 or Starting value + Median for the creature's caste.

I believe the medians default to 1000 for all attributes with ranges not specified in the raws (and is 1000 for a lot of attributes on a lot of creatures where it is specified)

[Skullsploder]

I suspected as much, but didn't want to post data that was false.

In that case,
Difference between parent mean and race median is 2,3% (a pretty good control if I may say so myself)
Difference between child mean and race median is 3,23%.

I will post the standard deviations later, when I can use my calculator. These are different from the difference between the average and whatever which I have been using until this point because they track the average difference rather than the difference between the averages, if that makes sense.

[PwndJa]

On an embark with a particularly large number of dogs, I had the thought that I could put 6-10 puppies in a 1x1 closet and, because they would fight, the strongest puppy would be... chosen. Sharks operate in a similar way, in that each egg has 2 sharks, and they fight to the death out of hunger before they're even born, making the idea better for reasons. Fun came early for that fort, though.

[Skullsploder]

Ok, let's sum everything up nicely and accurately in one post. Every stat given refers to strengh caps unless stated otherwise. Every perentage given is relative to the last statistic mentioned i.e. "percentage difference between a and b" = (a/b)*100

Child strengths:
916/1916
836/1836
1020/2040
1078/2156
1166/2332
1051/2102
919/1919
538/1538
1102/2204
348/1348
1624/3428

Race median: 2000

Parent mean: 2046
>Percentage off race median: 2,3%

Child mean: 2074,45
>Percentage off race median: 3,23%
>Percentage off parent mean: 1,39%

Variations:
>Average variation of child from child mean: 330,05 (15,91%)
>Average variation of child from parent mean: 333,73 (16,31%)
>Average variation of child from race median: 336,82 (16,81%)

You may notice some differences between these numbers and ones posted earlier. The earlier numbers are innacurate, these numbers are not.

While there is a slight tendency towards parental values over racial values, it is so slight as to be inconclusive, as, this being a control group, race median and parent mean are incredibly close. More data is needed, let's see what the strong and the weak groups give us.