The emergence and diversification of dog morphology | Hacker News Reader

The emergence and diversification of dog morphology

science.org

35 pointsMarshferm32 comments

The dogs that win prizes often disturb me. I feel like there must be a bunch of inbreeding going on, and maybe for features that look interesting but aren't necessarily good for them.

Is this concern misplaced? Not a dog show expert so maybe I'm just revealing my ignorance.

The genetics of inbreeding are extremely well-understood. Dog pedigrees are well tracked, and there are tools you can use to assist in preventing inbreeding. Irresponsible breeders give responsible breeders a bad name. Some breeders are even focusing on making breeds healthier as their goal.

How many hundreds of thousands of individual unhealthy dogs must be forced to life a life of suffering to make the “breed healthier as a goal” even if that laughable idea is successful?

Why not just not breed unhealthy dogs, adopt the many stray dogs that persist and only once we have empty shelters consider breeding healthy breeds?

Dogs are beings, not toys or decorations.

To answer your question honestly, the reason is because "healthy" isn't a binary. There certainly are dogs that are so unhealthy they should not be bred. But on the other hand, there is no world in which all dogs are 100% healthy: if your goal is to say animals should not be bred unless they are 100% healthy, they'll go extinct! Making progress reduces suffering.

Efforts to breed healthier dogs should not be mutually exclusive with efforts to empty shelters. I envision a world where the shelters are empty too: I don't believe it's necessary to stop the efforts to have healthier dogs until after the shelters are empty. You can make progress on two fronts at once!

When you say dogs are beings, not toys or decorations, you run the risk of sounding accusatory. I believe we have goals in common and could learn from each other without resorting to villainizing.

You are positing strawmen. GP did not say healthy was binary, nor that we could achieve 100% health in dogs.

And as for accusing: J'accuse. People who buy puppies that can't breathe properly are insensitive jerks.

You may be suffering downvotes, but your point is worthy. Real dogs are suffering lifelong breathing difficulties, hip pain, and so on, all because of breeding ideals.

There are bitter and heartstrong arguments on this topic. Brachycephalic breeds with flat faces or short snouts (for example pugs, bulldogs, boxers, Boston terriers) cause anger among some and devotion among others. (We are a three-pug family.) Pugs have an average lifespan of 12 to 15 years, as compared with the overall average dog lifespan of 10 to 13 years. We have also had (and loved) boxers, which have an average lifespan of 10 to 12 years. Boxers seem to be genetically prone to cancer, which is how we lost our most recent boxer.

There's a classic cartoon showing two wolves in the bushes at the edge of a campfire, looking at the leftovers being thrown around by the humans. One says, "Look, what the heck, let's cozy up to these two-legged creatures that seem to have lots of food. What could go wrong?"

Next frame is a picture of an unhappy-looking pug wearing a birthday hat..

I think the reason take so much offense at e.g. pugs is because they don't need to be bred that way. Where I'm at a law was passed making it illegal to breed dogs with congenital conditions. As a result basically all the pugs you see here have a bit of a snout as do all the boxers. Crucially this didn't change the breeds personality perceptibly, and it only changes the look the tiniest of bit. In trade you get dogs that are visibly happier and have more energy.

A neighbor in particular previously had two french bulldogs with no snout. They'd spend all day panting and snoring. Once they passed away they got new ones, now with snout. They spend all day running and jumping instead.

If I'm reading your meaning correctly, about lifespans, I think the comparison isn't quite correct?

lifespan seems to be more strongly correlated by size, not squashed-nosed-ness.

Consider chihuahua, shitzu's (and crosses: bichon-shitzu, ...), poodle crosses, heck lagotto (lagotti?). All can live well past 15.

Versus GSPs, great danes, Irish wolfhounds, and so on, coming in closer to say 6-10 years.

I've never really heard argument on lifespan of pugs et al versus other dogs, though. More around (perceived) ugliness/prettiness, and their breathing issues.

Every child should have a dog. It gives them valuable life lessons about responsibility, fidelity, unconditional love and to always turn around three times before you lie down.

Alternative viewpoint: separating a dog from its natural social life and forcing its integration into a human world, even if done out of a concept of affection, is morally wrong. I suspect future generations will liken the domination of many species, such as dogs and cats, to slavery.

> such as dogs and cats, to slavery.

Cats famously domesticated themselves though. More of a symbiosis than subjugation

Same applies to dogs really

Indeed. A year ago I purchased a working/field line golden retriever from a reputable breeder (pm me if interested) and embarked on training my first gun dog. We've done a few hunting trips this season and I found myself telling my father the other day something along the lines that I don't really care for the _hunting_ so much as I find something primal and natural about the symbiotic relationship that I've formed with this dog, especially when we hunt together. It's like he knows his chances of survival are better if we work this out together. I fail to articulate the feeling well.

And as a parent comment suggested a slavery relationship... I don't know.. If so, I've got a pretty well pampered and happy slave dog.

Just speculation but I imagine there was already symbiosis between humans and wolves long before people treated dogs as pets, livestock, or property. Semi wild dogs eating our food waste will also keep down rat and other pest populations and bark if potentially dangerous strangers suddenly show up. Win win, so no reason for us to drive them off, or for them to leave. I’ve seen this relationship in modern times in small rural muslim communities where people do not interact with the dogs for religious reasons, but are willing to let them live around their homes.

I don't contend with your view at all, and agree completely. I've spent lots of time in the Middle East and know exactly what you're speaking of. I actually happened upon this article the other day, whicj I found interesting regarding early symbiosis[1]. I'm not a biologist, so I can't speak to the subject a whole lot.

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-show...

> separating a dog from its natural social life

You’re thinking of the wolf pack that dogs came from millennia ago to be its “natural social life”. But the dogs around today are the result of myriad generations bred to be social with humans.

The eugenics involved in the breeding of modern dogs is an even larger moral issue than dominating individuals of the species.

Hmm. Not one single bit of information about "natural dog/cat life" is encoded into a shelter kitten's brain. All the data used to train their brain came from humans and their human environment. Cats even learn to talk human (as best as their vocal apparatus and GPU allows). Whether they're better off or worse off I don't know, but any given cat only knows it's historical environment. They're not "taken" from some other place. That happened tens of thousands of years ago and no brain content from that time has been propagated to present day cats.

Fwiw my cats have friends that are deer, by virtue of there being deer in their environment, and their curiosity. And deer are quite curious too. Actually we have magpies that are friends with deer too. If cats were somehow pre-wired to only want to associate with cats, why are they associating with deer?

Concerning cats, I'm specifically talking about imprisonment and mutilation. Cats are social roaming animals and many are kept staring out windows of small apartments and run for the door every time it's opened hoping for escape. Mutilation occurs regularly to keep them from procreating. All of this is socially accepted by humans. If a cat is running around free and being fed and sheltered by humans, no problem, but obviously this can lead to issues with feral populations that don't mix well with civic engineered spaces.

Dogs have orbital muscles above their eyes that wolves lack. The sole purpose of these muscles is to enable the dog to emote better... to humans. Dogs also cooperate with and interpret physical cues from humans the way wolves might with their packmates only. This also means that dogs can interpret uniquely human physical cues, such as pointing with a finger, which wolves cannot.

The natural social life of the dog is the human world. Humans and dogs co-evolved to live and work together. No other species enjoys this kind of symbiosis with us to this level; the horse probably comes the closest.

What do you mean its natural social life? Dogs are not wolves. Their natural social life is being with humans.

> Their natural social life is being with humans.

If this were true (which it is not), it would be because we have made it so through generations of forced eugenics and domination.

1. Evidence that it is not?

2. It would still be a fact, no matter how it came to be.

Not at all like slavery and I very much doubt that anyone will ever think so.

Slaves can state they want to be free, and often rebelled and resisted. Spartacus, the Zanj rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, and many more.

It requires constant indoctrination and denial of access to ideas and brutal suppression to even try to keep the resistance down even to those levels. No one censors what dogs can read (unlike, say, The Slaves Bible).

Dogs are demonstrably significantly intellectually inferior to human beings. other humans beings are not.

I do think it is lucky for them that other human species have not survived as they are demonstrably biologically different (at least not counting those we can interbreed with), probably unable to resist anything like as effectively, and would be far better slaves than humans and better experimental subjects than animals.

Dogs evolved over the last 45k years to be integrated with humans at a higher level than any other species. They need us, in the sense that they've offloaded the cognition needed for optimal living to the human species.

They gave up pack hunting, optimized cooperative socialization, amplified gentle and nurturing behaviors. Not only should all dogs be included in human lives, we have a moral responsibility to the species to provide for them the best possible existence.

This is not in support of fur-babies or dogs in strollers, to be clear. Dogs need function, stimulation, purpose, and relationships.

Cognitive studies, and the ongoing research with buttons, now in the tens of thousands of dogs and other pets, demonstrate that they're capable of understanding and using language, complex abstract thought, nuanced emotion, dreaming, strategizing, planning, and more. They'll never get to the point of writing books, but they can tell lies and play jokes, be sad, scared, brave, loving, goofy, and kind.

The idea that dogs should be wild is morally abhorrent - they are inextricably interwoven with the story of humanity, and dependent on us for their best lives. It's got nothing to do with affection, and everything to do with many tens of thousands of years of accelerated evolution resulting in specific complementary adaptations to humanity.

I grew up around dog show people and breeders and can confidently say that I learned a lot more about negative qualities in people than positive ones in dogs. Moreover some types of dogs are just by disposition, awful.

> turn around three times before you lie down.

It's not a laughing matter. How else will you repel bugs from your bed?

My first dog taught me how to love animals, and that is a gift for which I'll forever be grateful.

This is a very interesting study, and the authors clearly did very good work. That said, I don't think the main takeaway is as surprising as some of the coverage makes it sound. It's already very well established, both historically and genetically, that modern breeds were created by Victorian-era breeders using the dogs available in local populations. So the idea that the "raw material" (i.e. genetic variants) of 18th–19th century working dogs shaped modern morphology fits neatly with what we already know. For example (drawing from my area of expertise), the bull-and-terrier types that became modern pit bull–type breeds were created by crossing bull-baiting dogs with terriers, and they still reflect traits from both. The value of the paper, to me, isn't in overturning prior understanding but in providing a much more detailed timeline of how and when this diversification happened. It’s a solid contribution, but just maybe not as paradigm-shifting as recent headlines imply.

I always wondered if there was some genetic factor related to mutations, perhaps, that was stronger in dogs than cats, horses, cows, sheep, etc. There's such morphological variety.

I recommend this extraordinary book, The First Domestication the coevolution of Humans and Wolves, charting the possible events.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300226164/the-first-dome...

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