No I’m not a fascist (at least I hope not…)

I’m trying to understand why we’ve normalised the idea of eugenics in dogs (e.g. golden retrievers are friendly and smart, chihuahas are aggressive, etc.)¹ but find the idea of racial classification in humans abhorrent.

I can sort of see it from the idea that Nurture (culture and upbringing) would have a greater effect on a human’s characteristics than Nature would.

At the same time, my family tree has many twins and I’ve noticed that the identical ones have similar outcomes in life, whereas the fraternal ones (even the ones that look very similar) don’t really (N=3).

Maybe dog culture is not a thing, and that’s why people are happy to make these sweeping generalizations on dog characterics?

I’m lost a little

1: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/df/74/f7/df74f716c3a70f59aeb468152e4be927.png

  • runswithjedi@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 months ago

    The issue is thinking of genetics as prescriptive. Genetics simply influence behavior and setup initial probabilities.

    Plus the distinction with breed and behavior with dogs isn’t as extreme as most people think. Yes, some breeds do have some genes that do influence behavior, but most people don’t even know what kind of dog they have unless they have purebred documents.

    Here’s a great article from Ars Technica with a survey of thousands of dogs and linking their genes to behaviors. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/genetics-goes-to-the-dogs-finds-theres-not-much-to-breed-behavior/

    What we know vs. what we believe

    One of the caveats here may be that people who own purebred dogs may have expectations regarding their behavior and interpret things the dogs do accordingly. And there’s some evidence for that. Golden retrievers have a reputation for being friendly dogs, and the owners of retrievers tend to say that their pets don’t fear strangers. But the researchers were able to identify mutts with significant golden retriever ancestry and find that the behavior of these dogs is all over the map.

    Despite that caveat, a few behaviors appear to have a significant genetic component, and some of these behaviors have been partially selected for in some specific breeds. But there are two reasons to expect that the genetics of these behaviors would be complicated. As the researchers point out, the first is that most modern breeds only originated about 150 years ago, so the number of generations to fix subtle features like behaviors have been too few.

    The second issue is that, in humans, complicated behaviors tend to be shaped by many genetic factors that, individually at least, have a weak influence. There’s no real reason to expect that it would be different in dogs, making it significantly harder to select for that behavior in a breed.

    For actual dog owners, you can rest assured that there is a real genetic influence on some breed behaviors. And, if your own dog seems to be a complete mutant when it comes to its behavior… well, there’s a chance it is.

    • tetris11@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      Wow, what a well-sourced answer!

      Though it does not seem to land on any one conclusion about nature vs nurture

      • runswithjedi@lemmy.world
        0·
        8 months ago

        Because it’s both! Genes have never been wholly predictive of behavior. People have just wanted them to be.