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Genomic Analyses of Modern Dog Breed Development
- albertgoeswoof 9y agowoof
- user982 9y agoThe high and highly detailed predictability of individual dog behavior from breed alone is interesting and, particularly given many breeds' relative youth, heavily weights the nature/nurture debate in the former's favor for me.
- pjc50 9y ago.. for dogs. Don't let that encourage you to over-generalise about humans.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoWhy should it not also be the case with humans? Sure sure, our environment, development, nutrition, family bonding, etc, all has an effect on our intelligence. Dog breeding is just a euphemism for eugenics. Presumably all domestic dogs are descendents of one species of wild dog, so given that: Give me ~12,000 years and I'm willing to bet I can give you a breed of super intelligent humans (Border Collies) and a breed dumb dumbs (Bulldogs).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoI don't doubt that you could succeed in breeding humans, but I think that there are two ENORMOUS roadblocks that ought to be mentioned: 1. The Ethics Problem. Puppy mills are still around and still bad, and breeders in the past probably did some pretty terrible things to their dogs, but the human analog of the work performed by even the most humane dog breeders would still be a terrible travesty of the most basic human rights. Maybe I'm not creative enough or open-minded enough, but I can't conceive of a way to do this ethically. 2. The Nurture Option. A well-trained bulldog can be a much, much better dog than an untrained border collie. And one person can accomplish this training with a dog in a few years. Why spend 12,000 years breeding humans instead of putting a bit more effort into training the perfectly serviceable brains that we already have? I tried to find some statistics to back up the latter point. The US spends about 2.7%, or 102 billion of the 3800 billion federal budget, on education. States average about 30% of their budgets, or (very roughly) 550 billion of the 1850 billion sum of state budgets, on education. A further complication is that much of education funding is done using local property taxes, which vary wildly by location, but are generally similar to the sum of federal and state funding. This is a total of about 1.2 trillion in education funding. Honestly, that compares pretty favorably to a 19 trillion GDP. And it ignores all the extremely important effort and money spent by parents to educate their children, and private spending on post-secondary education.
- marchenko 9y agoThe trajectory of eugenic dog breeding is not one I would wish on my own species. https://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/100-years-of-breed-improvement/ https://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/100-year... It's sobering that the problem lies less in methodology, but in the caprices of the breeders. Even modern molecular techniques are susceptible to the problem of goal alignment.
- jasonl99 9y ago>>The Nurture Option. A well-trained bulldog can be a much, much better dog than an untrained border collie. And one person can accomplish this training with a dog in a few years. Why spend 12,000 years breeding humans instead of putting a bit more effort into training the perfectly serviceable brains that we already have? The cynic in me says that's exactly what's been done with humans. The school system in the United States was created, in large part, to train factory workers and be obedient citizens.
- simonsarris 9y agoBut let this encourage you any time: https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#genetics-links https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#genetics-links
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- frabbit 9y agoBeautiful cladogram