I would think so actually. Especially when you think about how science was becoming more popular and evolution was popping. I think some of the more wealthier and educated owners would think to have the strongest and hardest working procreate for super Slaves
Uh, no, Darwin's theory of evolution didn't even come out until after slavery ended.
Theories of Evolution we there infancy back then. However people did know how to breed horse and livestock. The question is how much of this was actually applied to slavery.
Every species of horse/livestock that's selectively bred is one that matures in just a few years.
The problem with humans is that it takes 15 years to mature. Average slaveowner probably has his slaves for 30-40 years at most...that's only 2 generations. They ain't going to be thinking about possibly having a better slave 50 years from now when they ready to die. Greedy b*stards aren't planning ahead thinking about their great-great-grandchildren like all that.
In India and Thailand, they've been using elephants for thousands of years. Yet Asian Elephants used for work in Asia are EXACTLY the same as Asian Elephants in the wild. They've never been selectively bred for any useful traits because it just takes them too fukking long to grow up. It's easier to just take what's available - no one is going to do a bunch of work for 50 years just in the "hope" that you might get a slightly better product by the time you're dead.
It took hundreds of years to even domesticate dogs, and them to get them to the specific breeds they are now took several hundreds more (selecting traits, in breeding / line breeding, culling unwanted animals etc) Another thing to consider is maturity rates for dogs is two years, obviously you can use them for work before that age but most working dogs 1 yr old is the young your going to start them at. With humans you really would have wait until (as sick as this sounds) 7/8 yrs old before they would be useful and even then kid would burn out quick
So imo , forcing slaves to have more children probably did happen but not on a large scakryand with very little if any scientific motivation behind it
Pretty much... No one in here is denying that it didn't happen, but did it happen on a large scale.. .seriously doubt it...
Exactly. It probably happened here or there, but made shyt nothing of a difference.
They most definitely used selective breeding. They didn't PICK or PURCHASE weak brehs....
Slavery lasted the longest in the states, the selective breeding program was advanced, and American Science was way ahead of the rest of the world at that time. Slavery built America into a superpower...OF COURSE they bred selectively...people weren't just being born all willy nilly...
This is just ridiculous. American science was way ahead of the rest of the world in the 1700s and early 1800s? What have you been smoking? Do you think that Newton, Volta, Watt, Dalton, Anders, or Darwin were Americans? And America wasn't a "superpower" until long after slavery was over.
Europe, especially England and Germany and to some extent Italy, was easily the center of the scientific world from the beginning of the scientific revolution all the way into the early 1900s. Even in the late 1800s, well after slavery was over, most of the greatest American scientists (Alexander Graham Bell, Nicolai Tesla) were immigrants who had been trained in Europe first. Hell, the Manhattan Project in the 1940s was 70-80% immigrants at the top levels. America has only very, very recently emerged as a scientific power.
And that wiki article was one of the most useless ones I've seen. There was exactly ONE quote from a slave claiming that selective breeding happened, and ONE historian vouching for it, while TWO historians were quoted arguing against it. Not exactly a case for some advanced, long-term selective breeding program.
Slave owners cared about numbers far more than some pie-in-the-sky idea of genetic improvements hundreds of years in the future.