You can absolutely think broder collies are naturally driven to herd dogs, or Newfoundlands are naturally driven to fetch from water without being racist to your fellow human. I mean wtf!
However, I think the more powerful correlation is that of owners selecting breeds and training for expected behaviors: Some Newfies can be trained not to jump in the water at every opportunity (mine is capable of this restraint, but will always let me know she wants to). Few Newfies will be afraid of the water. But dog owners who know they want their dogs in and around water may select Newfies, swim with them, and otherwise encourage that behavior. More relevant to the article, owners who want dogs to guard their property will select certain breeds who may have only a slight nature for guarding but will nurture that behavior.
A useful study would be able to provide a recommended course of action an owner could take to reduce the likelihood their dog bites, which is what my proposed study above would do. TRAIN YOUR DOGS PEOPLE.
And while yes, dog owners do have a huge influence on a dogs character, it's undoubtedly harder to teach a collie how to hunt and a terrier how to herd than it is to teach them the role they are actually known for. That's not true for humans, and his comparison is just incredibly uncomfortable because it implies a similar difference between say, pitbull and a greyhound. Which is not true.
Dogma. Prove it. Link to any amount of supporting evidence.
1. Serpell, James, ed. The domestic dog. Cambridge University Press, 2017. (start on page 70, available on Google books, too long to quote)
And
2. "We found that a large proportion of behavioural variance across breeds (among-breed heritability) is attributable to genetic factors (figure 1a). The mean among-breed heritability was 0.51 ± 0.12 (s.d.) across all 14 traits (range: h2 = 0.27–0.77), and significantly higher than the null expectation in all cases (permutation tests, p < 0.001). These estimates are also significantly higher than those in previous studies assessing heritability of the same traits in large within-breed samples (mean difference = 0.37, 95% CI = 0.44–0.30; t13 = −12.25, p < 0.001; [44], but see [45]). Incorporating among-breed variance thus yields h2 estimates that are on average, five times higher (range = 1.3–25.5 times higher) than traditional within-breed estimates, which could be due to limited genetic and phenotypic variation within breeds." (MacLean, Evan L et al. “Highly heritable and functionally relevant breed differences in dog behaviour.” Proceedings. Biological sciences vol. 286,1912 (2019): 20190716. doi:10.1098)
General consensus among proper studies is the opposite: behavior is not highly heritable.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2015.06.006
Table 1 is quite extensive. Nearly all of the two dozen studies show less than 10% heritability of the measured behaviors.
Humans were. And are.