>>12831308Probably somewhere in the middle - more intelligent than the average rat, but probably only in that specialized area of spatial visualization/pathfinding. That's the danger of selecting for too fine of a criteria.
The smarter approach would have been to have a number of different types of tests testing different criteria (mazes to test spatial visualization, food puzzles to test problem solving, memory games to test memorization, etc etc etc) and then selecting the rats based on individual *and* total scores, with some cutoff for each of the individual scores, and a cutoff for the total score which is equal-to or greater-than the sum of the individual cutoffs. Then you can segregate them into four groups:
Population I - Subjects who meet both cutoffs.
Population II - Subjects who fail the individual cutoff of one or more subjects, but have a total score which gets them above the total cutoff.
Population III - Subjects who meet neither cutoff.
Pop I and II breed, Pop III are eliminated
Ex. Say you have three criteria - mazes, food puzzles, and memory games - and for a particular generation the individual cutoff score is 2. The total cutoff needs to be at least 6 (but could be made higher).
A score of 1, 1, 1 fails 3/3 individuals, and fails total. Pop III
A score of 1, 2, 2 fails 1/3 individuals, and fails total. Pop III
A score of 6, 1, 0 fails 2/3 individuals, but passes total. Pop II
A score of 4, 1, 3 fails 1/3 individuals, but passes total. Pop II
A score of 4, 2, 3 fails 0/3 individuals, and passes total. Pop I
Having a secondary cutoff condition let's you keep the 'exceptional idiots' (subjects who excel in some tasks but fail in others) in the gene pool for several generations until eventually the total cutoff gets high enough that exceptional scores in one area aren't enough to make up for abysmal scores in others.
