This is one of those studies where the conclusion is so obviously wrong that I don't even want to open it, and it makes me discount the credibility of Nature overall.
Some people would use this as a moment to question what they know about dog breeds, but you choose to double down on your beliefs. Very human of you! [0][1][2][3]
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-pathways-experie...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance
[2] http://aphilosopher.drmcl.com/2015/12/11/doubling-down/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0...
They derived 8 behavioural factors from the survey questions, and there are a few which are very relevant to dog-human aggression.
#1: Human sociability #2: Arousal level #4: Biddability #5: Agonistic threshold (agonistic is the behavioural term encompassing aggression)
Those are probably the most relevant. There is an important consideration which does seem to be missing from the study, but only reinforces its conclusion:
Most, if not all of these factors can be altered with behaviour modification (training).
You can raise a dogs agonistic threshold with classical conditioning. You can increase its biddability with operant conditioning. You can lower its arousal level with both.
Does training rewrite DNA? Obviously not.
> Most, if not all of these factors can be altered with behaviour modification (training).
What percentage of dog owners know how to train a dog properly, or hire someone who can? It just seems like you're not thinking about how dogs exist in the real world.
Not really bold, just sensible and rational when there is a large amount of evidence the paper is wrong. After all, many papers are found to be wrong. I believe there was even a study that measured the ability of people to predict which papers would turn out to be not replicable... I'll try to find a link to that and post it here.
"Study of pet dogs shows breed does not predict behaviour"
While the paper states:
"Breed is not a reliable predictor of individual behavior"
If it needs to be spelt out: The former implies no correlation between breed and behavior, while the latter explicitly says that breed does not reliably predict an individual's behavior, it could be a pronounced bell curve but you still have outliers.
So yes, the article title is obviously wrong and any sane person should trust their gut over it. And what is actually stated in the paper (not mentioning the conclusion because it doesn't have jack to do with the article title) in relation to this article's point is an obvious observation: It doesn't hurt to have data on, but is pretty much pointless for anything except producing bullshit, misleading, clickbaity pop science articles.
Even the article itself recognizes that there's a significant correlation between breed and certain behaviors, but merely dismisses it as "smaller than expected".
If Nature put out a paper saying the sky is red, it would be entirely rational of me to question what on Earth is going on at Nature, rather than my years of experience of blue skies.
They didn't put out a paper saying the sky is red, they put out a paper saying the magnitude of impact from breed on dog behavior is substantially less pronounced than previously thought.
It is not rational for you to double down on this belief.
The headline does not say "substantially less pronounced than previously thought". The headline says "breed does not predict behaviour (nature.com)". Any fool who works with dogs will tell you that yes, it ruddy well does.
And no, the "headline" (called a "Title") of the paper published in Nature says, "Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes".
Are you saying there aren’t enough differences in human genetics to allow us to group them in a meaningful way?
The San diverged from the rest of humanity ~200,000 years ago. Australian Aboriginals ~40,000 years ago. Amerindians ~12,000 years ago.
No one’s been breeding humans but there’s been plenty of reproductive isolation. Enough that differences in selection pressures could easily lead to differences in traits. For a visible example 5,000 years ago there were no populations that looked like Swedes. Humans that pale did not exist apart from albinos.
What does religion have to do with this? I didn't say to to rely on faith, rely on the scientific institution that already came to a concensus a long time ago. The studies are out there, if you want to see proof. Just because I don't have them on hand doesn't mean they don't exist and need to be taken on faith
Selective pressure makes change. Different selective pressure makes difference. Reproductive isolation makes large differences possible. Humans have lived in very different environments and been reproductively isolated. There is no a priori reason to believe human populations are the same on every trait. And they’re not. Similar on most things but not on everything.
More importantly this knowledge would be useless if you found it, because the only reason to know things is to make predictions, and this doesn't let you predict anything about the next generation. We're in modernity now and they can just move somewhere else.
[0] which funny enough isn't considered a subspecies and doesn't have a Latin name because the scientist who discovered them thinks Latin names are pretentious.
Mating isn’t random. People are more likely to mate with those who live near them. So Southern Chinese are more like each other than Northern Chinese. Geography matters. Distance matters. If there’s reproductive isolation difference can emerge and persist. If there isn’t it won’t.
Geography isn’t the only way populations stay distinct. Religion, language, means of sustenance can do it too but interbreeding can reduce difference very, very quickly as you note.
If the specific claims I made about the length of reproductive isolation are false you will find it easy to provide sources to that effect.
Thus, it's observably true that the position that there are no human subspecies isn't a scientific one, but rather a moral one. Personally I'm comfortable with that, because being Catholic I account all human beings to be created in the image of God and equal in worth in His eyes. Whether or not there are genetically determined differences in mean behavior between different ancestry groups in Homo Sapiens doesn't change that one bit. Neither for that matter does how scientists choose to classify them.
Your reliance on stereotype is not only racist but it's factually wrong.
This is well studied, and if you are actually curious, there are many, many sources of information about this topic you can find yourself.
Race does not exist, genetically. Period.
And yet ancestry.com can comfortably tell anyone which continental scale human population or populations they are descended from and that happens to map pretty neatly to the US Census Bureau's notion of race.
Being aware that major geographic features of the Earth such as the Atlantic Ocean, the Himalayas, and the Sahara Desert were more or less impermeable barriers to gene flow between continental human populations until about five centuries ago isn't racist and you should stop calling people names.
But that's just clustering and it would work on any random groups you chose. In particular, it would still work if they picked a group where none of the members were related to each other (and indeed that's how it works now). As long as you're related to one of them it'd still be able to show you're a member of it.
And the this Barrier Theory was proposed by eugenicists in the 20s and thoroughly debunked by the 30s.
There’s no canonical Swede or Arab? You don’t say. As I mentioned no one who looks like a Swede existed 5,000 years ago. That there is overlap between population characteristics does not mean they are identical. Some populations don’t overlap though. Healthy Pygmy and Maasai adult men do not overlap in height distribution. If you restrict your sample of Swedes to those with all ancestors born in Sweden in 1800 and do a similar restriction for Congolese there will be no overlap in skin color.
There absolutely were ancient people who shared genetic traits (and therefore some expressed characteristics) with modern Swedish people. There literally must have been, that's how genetics work, and 5,000 years is barely a blink, genetically.
What you are conflating (among many, many things) are environmental impacts on human maturation with genetics, and in exactly the same way that the eugenicists of the early 1900s were attempting to do.
Every single thing you've said so far has been thoroughly debunked in the ensuing 100 years. You are spouting old, racist tropes, and I assume don't even know it.
But maybe you do know it, and maybe that's the point.
That’s kind of my point. 5,000 years ago there were no people who looked like Swedes. Now there are because of selection pressures. A new genotype came into existence by working on standing variation and some de novo mutations. If we agree that selection pressures can radically change the appearance of a people then there’s not much to disagree on. Evolution can work on many things apart from physical appears.
Different places have different selection pressures, with the obvious consequences.
100% false. You need to realize that. 5,000 years is not enough time to do anything significant, genetically.
Most dog breeds were created in less than 150 years. Call it 150 generations. 5,000 years is 200 generations at 25 years per generation. Enough time to change quite dramatically.
And no, humans were not bred like dogs, so your math is both offensive and completely useless.
At this point I'm beginning to think you're being intentionally hateful.
That the selection pressures on dogs were due to humans performing artificial selection and those on humans due to the environment does not mean that they weren’t both selection pressures. Thus brown ancestors to the very pale Swedes.
We’re only confident agriculture has existed for ~5,000 years. Hunter gatherers don’t have the kinds of complex societies that can do organized coercion in a sustained way over generations. Even if you restrict yourself to post agriculture arranged marriage is far from universal and there’s no evidence I’m aware of of a sustained breeding programme selecting for some trait among humans.
Not random and selectively bred work at very different speeds.
Extrapolating from the few extant hunter gatherer tribes that never achieved complex civilization to the tribes that invented agriculture is obviously wildly erroneous.
You are speaking about sensitive matters you know very little.
People were never "bred", arranged marriages were never genetically consistent across even one generation, let alone many, and your continued ignorant speculation aligns disturbingly well with how eugenicists described human evolution through the early 20th century.
Please stop spouting racist ideas, these were debunked thoroughly in the 1910s by Franz Boas and then over and over again by his students.
See the sickle cell trait for instance.
I feel you're unable to discuss productively on this matter because you seem to think that believing in the concept of phenotypes means support for eugenics... which no one here is advocating for.
And none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the cultural concept of race. There are people who are not "Tibetans" who have this genetic adaptation, and there are "Tibetans" who do not have this genetic adaptation.
Further, the pairing of this genetic trait with other genetic traits does not exist. Having this genetic trait does not make you more likely to have a set of other genetic traits, and none of the genetic traits add up to a specific "Tibetan" set of features or traits, all of which you would need to have to be called "Tibetan".
There is no such thing as "genetic race".
There is no evidence that anyone you're replying to is writing in bad faith. They may be wrong, although you've failed to show that in any way that satisfies intellectual curiosity, but that doesn't justify personal attacks and slimy rhetoric[1].
You are a user, same as me. I'd even argue attempting to enforce the rules as a user is a violation of those very same rules.
I believe the people I'm talking to right now are supporting racist ideas and policies, and that makes those people, definitionally, racists. Including you! I apply no moral judgement to that term here; if you do not want to be called a racist, do not support ideas and policies that are racist.
Quite true. Race is a useless and imprecise term and it’s a pity you felt the need to start talking about it. The clustering of traits among human ancestry population groups and the reasons for that don’t need that baggage.