October 15, 1996

Dear Bill,

Well it is a small small world. I had asked Dr Romanov to translate Mazing paper on the origin of the duck and when it arrived I find that he has been working with you and Dr Corti on a book. His wording suggests that both you and Dr Corti have a book but I assume that it is just a book of Dr Corti because I have had no news of you writing a book. Incidentally the paper by Mazing was not too much. It did contain the fact that his crossing of the Mallard and the Pekin revealed that the white egg color of the Pekin was due to a recessive gene. Of course Lancaster had mentioned that in his review but it is nice to have seen the source.

Loyl Stromberg has sent me a copy of his book Poultry of the World. It makes me feel sad because it represents so much effort and yet with a little more editing and scholarship it would have been so much better. It refers to your contributions on origins and in fact grants you a doctorate. Hello Dr Plant. Anyway his pictures are good and I suppose even a bad book is better than none. This reminds me that Schippers was also working on a book along the same lines but I’ve had no news on its progress. If true, Schippers book will be more scholarly.

I have been neglecting my studies on Muscovy Duck the past two years mostly due to my efforts to breed and sell (the latter a new field for me) pure lines for certain niche markets in China. I have also sold the pure lines for making white tailed brown egg layers, e.g., DERCO bred in Belgium the past 25 years.

One of the more interesting spin-offs of the breeding has been to find in my attempts to make a black tailed red dwarf recessive whites among the crosses of JA 57 and its sexing errors (and only recognized after 6 generations). IO only have 5 white birds – very bad picture enclosed – but I think they will make a very saleable line.

The JA 57 is a wonderful bird and I expect its derivatives to be wonderful too. Dominant white is carried on a very small chromosome and I don’t know that it is linked to anything important so no important genes should have been lost from the genome of the JA 57.

Over the past two years I have collected information for a History of the JA 57 and, as I don’t recall ever sending you a copy, one is enclosed. You can see my enthusiasm for dwarfs and especially this one. Bill, I would appreciate it if you would pass the History along to Meg Miller after you have read it. Reminds me I have not heard from her in a long time.

About 2 years ago, a woman Chinese “geneticist” whom I have known casually the past 20 years asked me to make a recessive white pure for gold. This was done by mating New Hampshire pattern birds known to carry recessive white. Lo and behold, in the generation in which the pure cc were supposed to segregate about 25% of the chickens have red heads and some red backs although they feather out white as the second picture enclosed will show. I suppose you can recall all those smoky and black pigmented dead white down of White Plymouth Rock chicks.

I think the red heads are pure for ewh as well as cc but will not know until I back cross some onto New Hampshires. (NH that do not carry c). Incidentally this breeding work is being done in France.

Dr Corti wrote to tell me of his proposed tour of Europe with you. I connected him with Glenn Whitley who was mentioned to me in a letter from our old friend George Carter " George is still smarting over the rejection of his manuscript. Now he has a new worry " carbon dating does support his contention of the presence of precolumbian chickens. As you may have heard, poor George had a stroke and despite a good recovery he now is more easily frustrated. I’ve not heard from Glenn in a long time so don’t know how things went.

Well I have rambled on for too long. If you did write a book let me know.

All the best.

Taken from a letter written in 1989 to Bill Plant and George Carter because of their confidence in the polyphyletic origin of the chicken.

When Roy Crawford wrote in Poultry Breeding and Genetics the latest summary of information on the origin in 1990, he overlooked Hagadoorn.

Overlooked opinion on the origin of chicken

Darwin believed that Gallus bankiva must have been the ancestor of all our present breeds of domestic fowl because of their general coloration, single comb and double wattle. In Animal Breeding Hagadoorn asks the usual questions: is this Gallus a species so easily tamed that it probable that it was taken into cultivation by man? Can we explain the enormous variability and multiformity of our domestic chickens by assuming that one single wild species was taken into cultivation?

Hagadoorn answers that, of the three species of living Jungle Fowl, Gallus bankiva certainly does not have the disposition which would cause it to stay around the house where it was raised as a chick. By contrast Gallus sonnerati is the only wild species that is tameable.

He writes: "Several of my friends and correspondents have raised chicks from wild-found eggs under domestic hens and two men have bred the birds in aviaries. They are enormously flighty and hard to tame, and they seem to lack the strong homing instinct of our domestic chickens. Chicks running with a hen act like pheasant chicks: they roost early and tend to wander off sometimes abandoning their foster mother, or even taking hen with them, so that she becomes as wild as they." [1]

“Gallus varius chicks will act in the same way although adults confined to an aviary will become tame enough. Gallus sonnerati chicks, on the other hand, (according to Ghigi who has had considerable experience with the wild species) happen to have a strong homing instinct – chicks and adults can be given their freedom and will come home to roost. These facts make it quite impossible to assume that bankiva is the ancestor of our domestic poultry in the sense of this being the first species to be taken into domestication.”

To Darwin lack of qualities seen in domestic chickens was a strong argument against either Gallus varius or sonnerati having contributing to the evolution of our domestic chickens. On the other hand wild bankiva also differs in some striking points from domestic fowl. The males undergo an eclipse moult. Wild males have peculiarly shaped hackle-feathers, with the tips curving from front to back. In the breeding season the hackles are pointed and yellow; after the seasonal (summer) moult, the hackle-feathers are short and rounded and much less conspicuously colored. e.g. Hagadoorn also observes that the plumage of wild species varies somewhat according to their locality.

Hagadoorn believed that one species could not have produced the diversity of domestic fowl. This diversity can be explained by tamed sonnerati being crossed with one or more of the other wild species. Although it would have seemed absurd to assume in Darwin’s time that the appearance of “inheritable” novel characteristics could be considered the result of crossbreeding, Hagadoorn thinks new combinations of genes can account for the great diversity of domestic fowl without the need to postulate the existence of a now-extinct wild species.

Although wild-living species are relatively pure and often not widely different from one another, we must remember that they differ in many dozens of genes. All those genes that are not common property are recombined in the hybrids germ cell in a kaleidoscopic way, so that the resulting potential variability and also the obvious multiformity of the hybrid populations is prodigious. [2]

Selection of striking looking individuals especially males, is common even among primitive people who otherwise seem to have very little pride in their birds and give them only a minimum of attention. This may account for such traits as rose comb, bare neck, white color, blue eggs?

Refreshing though Hagadoorn’s point of view may be, can it be defended? Those who endorse the conventional point of view, a monophyletic origin of the chicken because of Darwin’s view put, I think, too much responsibility on poor Charley who, despite his passion for prolixities, did not have time to give the question more than passing attention. But the evidence for the idea that because of the diversity of domestic fowl there must have been another, probably giant, now extinct progenitor, is no more persuasive.

The authoritative Gray’s Bird Hybrids reports fertile hybrids among crosses between bankiva and sonnerati, varius, and also lafayettei, the Ceylon jungle fowl.

Hagadoorn is also the first (chronologically speaking), to my knowledge, to mention that primitive people take an enormous interest in raising young animals and birds as pets and this tradition persists in less developed countries to this day.

He makes a distinction between tame and domesticated species, whether born in captivity or raised from eggs found in the forest. Domesticated species have instincts which bind them to the home. (He did not differentiate between domestic and domesticated species. Domestic species by definition reproduce in captivity. Domesticated species e.g. Indian elephant reproduce in the wild from whence they are captured and tamed.)

References:

Danforth, C.H., 1958. Gallus sonnerati and the domestic fowl. Jour. of Hered. 49:167 (Provocative paper describing crosses of the two that demonstrates possible polyphyletic origin of domestic chicken)

Hagadoorn, A.L., 1945 Animal Breeding Crosby Lockwood and Son Ltd. London and succeeding editions, pp 65 and 66

Wood-Gush, D.G.M., 1959. A history of domestic chicken. Poul.Sci. 38:321