Q18 - Zoologist: Every domesticated large

[michael.gorshein]

Having trouble dissecting this argument. Please help! Don't understand why B is preferred to C.

[ohthatpatrick]

The author is concluding that most wild large animals we see today either wouldn't be worth domesticating or would be too difficult to domesticate.

Why?

Because generations of humans have already done all that testing for us. Earlier humans tried to domesticate any wild large mammal that "seemed worth domesticating" and found out how difficult it was to domesticate each species.

All the large mammals we currently see domesticated today were species who "made the cut".

How can you argue with this author's conclusion? How can we accept that earlier humans tested all "seemingly worthwhile" large mammals and filtered out the too-difficult ones, but still argue that today there could be some wild mammals that are worth domesticating?

(if we think of any way to make that counterargument, great. but even if not, we want to frame our thinking this way as we begin to read answers)

Remember for Necessary Assumption questions the incredible value of using the Negation Test. A necessary assumption is just the opposite of an objection.

For example:
All teenagers like Justin Bieber. Thus, some of Bob's friends like Justin Bieber.

OBJECTION: Bob doesn't have any teenage friends.
NEC ASSUMP: Bob has at least some teenage friends.

If you negate (B), it says "it IS much easier today to domesticate wild large mammals" than it used to be. Is this an objection to the argument?

Yes. If it's much easier to domesticate wild mammals now, then some species deemed "too hard to domesticate" by early humans would now be viable candidates for domestication. That would go against the author's conclusion.

If you negate (C), it says "ALL of the large mammals domesticated in the past are still in existence". Is this an objection to the argument?

No. Expressed in other words, does the author need to assume that ALL large mammals domesticated in the past are still around today? No. Who cares whether some of them have gone extinct since then? The author is only arguing that animals which were deemed by early humans to be "too difficult / not worth it" are still animals which would be deemed by modern humans as "too difficult / not worth it".

(Choice (C) is tempting because its wording is close to a legit assumption - the author is assuming that "all of the undomesticated large mammal species in existence today were in existence in the past". The author thinks that all the wild mammals we see nowadays have been evaluated by early humans.)

Remember when you use the Negation Test, if the negated answer becomes a objection to the conclusion/argument, then that answer is correct! If the negated answer is not an objection to the conclusion/argument, then eliminate that answer.

Other answers:
(A) "each" is too extreme. The author merely said that early humans tried to domesticate each wild mammal worth domesticating.
(D) Too extreme. Be careful of "the more X, the more Y" type answers. The author doesn't need a relationship between "how easy" and "how worthwhile". He believes early humans evaluated "how worthwhile" and "how easy". That's it.
(E) Even more extreme. The author doesn't need it to be the case that the very first domesticated mammal was the easiest.

Let me know if you have lingering questions.

[hwangbo.edu]

I can see how B would be the answer with matthew.mainen's explanation - an aspect of the present is substantially different from the past and thus the trend can't be applied to the present - but I'm not understanding Patrick's explanation for B. I just don't see how negating B works to break the zoologist's conclusion. You can partially reject it based on a negation of B since difficulty is no longer a valid reason to explain the existence of wild animals, but it's entirely possible that those now easier to domesticate animals simply aren't worth taking the effort to do, which the author's conclusion provides for. So I'm just not seeing how B is necessary in that regard. Can someone explain?

I share your confusion and so will give this problem a go.

This is an unusual Necessary Assumption (NA) question for the Negation test. The argument concludes with a qualified ("most") disjunction ("either/or") for which the negated NA apparently fails to invalidate.

One possible explanation is that negating this NA forces the conclusion itself to change - from a disjunction (i.e., most wild large mammal species today are either too difficult or not worthy to domesticate) to a single choice (i.e., most wild large mammal species today are not worthy). And this new "single choice" conclusion remains subject to other unaddressed gaps (e.g., thousands of years ago v. today, seemed worth v. actual worth, the qualifier "most" is based on which reference, and so forth).

Does this explanation even make sense? This is such a weird NA question and so would appreciate any insight toward better approaching this type of problem on the LSAT.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Hey hwangbo.edu, I'm not sure I see it this way...

One possible explanation is that negating this NA forces the conclusion itself to change - from a disjunction (i.e., most wild large mammal species today are either too difficult or not worthy to domesticate) to a single choice (i.e., most wild large mammal species today are not worthy). And this new "single choice" conclusion remains subject to other unaddressed gaps (e.g., thousands of years ago v. today, seemed worth v. actual worth, the qualifier "most" is based on which reference, and so forth).

I would say instead that there's a comparison being made between the difficulty in domesticating large mammals a thousand years ago and today. Answer choice (B) rules out a possible difference that would destroy the argument.

Also, I corrected the issue you pointed out in the other post, thank you!

[erikwoodward10]

I don't see how B is required. It's the best answer choice, fine, but I still don't like it. What is "much easier"? Couldn't something be "much easier" today than it was a million years ago, but still pretty difficult? I mean, it is much easier for me to score a 180 on the LSAT today than it was 20 years ago (given the technology available for studying, forums like this), but it is still very, very difficult to do!

[huskybins]

Just wonder why A is not the correct necessary assumption. From the stimulus, we know humans in the past tried to domesticate each mammal species that seemed worth domesticating, and from there the author arrives at the conclusion that most wild mammal species in existence today would either be difficult to domesticate or would not be worth domesticating.

Now the question comes up: how about those wild mammal species that were seemed NOT worth domesticating while they were actually worth that or they were actually easier that thought to be domesticated? If humans never tried to domesticate such wild mammals before and only depended on their raw judgement to decide whether to domesticate a mammal species, how can the author assert most of wild mammals today are difficult or not worth domesticating?

So someone may respond like this: "Look! The author only concludes 'most' of such wild mammal species are not suitable for domestication; it actually offers some leeway to accommodate your question above: i.e. he concedes that some wild mammal species that may be worth domesticated were however not tried". If that is the case, I am afraid the one made the assumption that the wild mammal species human tried in the past are most number of the wild mammals species in total. Then ironically, the one already agreed what A is correct: if the human never tried to domesticate every species (or most) of wild mammals before, how can we claim that "MOST" of them are not worth domestication or difficult to domesticate?

[ohthatpatrick]

Just remember that Necessary Assumption is simply the task of
Which answer, when negated, most weakens the argument?

Negating (A)
"there is at least one wild large mammal that humans never tried to domesticate"

Not much punch. ONE wild large mammal that wasn't domesticated?

Negating (B)
It is MUCH EASIER today to domesticate wild large mammals.

Way more weakening effect.

[huskybins]

Thanks Guru for your reply! I used to bookmark all your replies for any LSAT question I felt difficult to understand -- all of them were made of plain words in straightforward way with illustrative examples and of course with great sense of humor I appreciate so much. But I am sorry your explanation to this question could be an exception.

For the conclusion of the passage, I guess we both agree that either condition A or condition B can cause the situation C in existence.
Condition A: too difficult to domesticate wild mammals
Condition B: not worth in domesticating those mammals
Situation C: still most wild mammals today are not domesticated.
In a simple form, A or B --> C

If we weaken the answer choice B, it only negates the condition A while has condition B open for any possibility. Namely, we may still have a situation like NOT A& B--> C: it means that negation of B can still be compatible with the conclusion. So such a negation won't help too much to wreck the conclusion as we expect.

On the other side with respect to answer choice A, I reject your negation with respect: the negation of "domesticate each wild mammal species" means "NOT every wild mammals have been domesticated" rather than "ONE wild large mammal that wasn't domesticated". Since not every wild mammal species have been tried of being domesticated, it is a strong reason to deny the validity of "MOST" wild mammals not worth being or too difficult to be domesticated as claimed in the conclusion of the passage -- since you did not try every possibility simply because of "seemed not worth", how can you tell most of those non-tried are actually not worth?!

Just remember that Necessary Assumption is simply the task of
Which answer, when negated, most weakens the argument?

Negating (A)
"there is at least one wild large mammal that humans never tried to domesticate"

Not much punch. ONE wild large mammal that wasn't domesticated?

Negating (B)
It is MUCH EASIER today to domesticate wild large mammals.

Way more weakening effect.

[ohthatpatrick]

Two different points:


1. Yes, the negation of (B) still allows for a counterargument. That's fine. Necessary Assumption answers, when negated, don't have to DISPROVE the conclusion. They just have to badly weaken the argument.

The negation of (B) would qualify as a correct answer on a Weaken question, since it shows the dubious comparison being made between the past and the present.


2. Negating "all" means "not all" ... or negating "every" means "not every".

Not all / not every = at least one exception

Not all A's are B = Some A's are not-B = At least one A is not-B

Claim:
I've tried every kind of potato chip

LIAR! (negation)
You have NOT tried every kind of potato chip.
There is at least one kind of potato chip you have not tried.

When you were objecting to my negation, you changed what it said.

You made it seem like I was saying
"Not every A is a B" = "one A is ~B"

I'm saying that the correct translation is
"not every A is a B" = "at least one A is ~B"

We've either tried domesticating EVERY large mammal (100%)
or NOT EVERY large mammal (0 - 99.999%)

The reason we're so wary of extreme/specific language in necessary assumption is precisely because of how little a difference its truth value usually makes.

Whether we've tested 100% or 99% of large mammals is rarely going to make a big difference.

Similarly, "most" is so dangerous in NA, because whether it was
51% vs. 49% is rarely going to matter.


And thanks for the kind words! Glad the forum (and my stuff) is helpful.

[seychelles1718]

When I read the stimulus, I immediately paid attention to "difficult to domesticate" in the conclusion because I though it was a new element in the conclusion. No premises mention or address about being easy or difficult to domesticate. I believe being seemingly worthwhile is totally different from easiness/difficulty of domesticating because an animal that is very worthwhile to domesticate still can be very difficult to domesticate. So I anticipated the right answer will exploit this missing link to "difficulty" in the conclusion. But it turned out question tests us from a whole different perspective...

Can someone please explain how my thought process is wrong?

[ohthatpatrick]

The correct answer DOES still deal with ease vs. difficulty, but you're saying you were envisioning a specific missing link that connected "_____" with "difficult to domesticate"?

What was the first half of that missing link, in you're thinking?

A new term in the conclusion definitely merits our attention. We should think about what idea in the evidence was intended to match up with / lead to the new idea in the conclusion.

But remember that new terms in the conclusion only HAVE to be part of the correct answer if we're doing a Sufficient Assumption question.

Necessary Assumption, Flaw, Strengthen, Weaken, etc. will give us arguments with multiple vulnerabilities.

So we may notice a missing link to a new term in the conclusion, but we can't INSIST on that being the right answer. We'll have to think flexibly and consider an additional objection one could make to the argument.

In this argument, I was associating "People TRIED innumerable times to domesticate the mammals that seemed worth domesticating" with "they were difficult to domesticate".

If a wild large mammal that exists today existed thousands of years ago and was worth domesticating, we know that people would have tried innumerable times to domesticate that species.

But since they apparently failed to do so, since this species we're describing is STILL "wild", then it was apparently difficult to domesticate them.

That's not a rock solid equivalence, so it would have been fair to get a correct answer that said something like
"at least some species that people tried and failed to domesticate innumerable times were difficult to domesticate"

[典张120]

I know the other answers are wrong but I cannot figure out B. The stimulus says "would be difficult to domesticate". I think it means they were hard to domesticate in the past and whether it is easier to domesticate today is irrelevant.

[JoshuaD177]

I know the other answers are wrong but I cannot figure out B. The stimulus says "would be difficult to domesticate". I think it means they were hard to domesticate in the past and whether it is easier to domesticate today is irrelevant.

This is also the reason I got this wrong, but now I see that if they meant "would be difficult to domesticate in the past" then they would have said "would have been difficult to domesticate". Silly mistake