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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Dogs have been bred, and certain breeds are nature-inclined to certain behaviors, but the parent is somewhat correct in that the influence of that nature is limited.

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.

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I obviously agree that it's still a lot of nurture, and that breeds can totally deviate from their original "characteristics" or intended purpose. My point was more that it's still completely different to humans because broadly speaking, specific dog breeds are much more likely to instinctively behave in a specific way. Whereas let's say the difference between middle eastern and white men is almost purely "nurture", and the nature part is usually purely physical.

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.

Modern dogs are so far from what they were bred for, the dominant influence by far is the influence of the owners. The only relevant statistic would be: percent of bites by dogs that are owned by humans who have not properly trained the dog. That will be a statistics that is more than trivia, the charts in that article are useless trivia paid for by tax dollars.

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.

>certain breeds are nature-inclined to certain behaviors

Dogma. Prove it. Link to any amount of supporting evidence.

You are by far the most dogmatic person on this comment section. Are you actually saying there's no genetic element to dig behavior? Not only does that go against scientific consensus, I'm not even aware of any debate or controversy on the subject at all. There's certainly a debate around which one is the dominant factor, but afaik it's pretty fringe to claim there's no genetic factor. I assume any amount of citations and proof won't convince you but there you go:

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)

So what you did here was google something then cherry pick examples that support your findings. However, if you dig into the sources you'll find the authors are part a network of psuedoscientist eugenicists.

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.

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