
Genomic Analyses of Modern Dog Breed Development - fern12
http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(17)30456-4
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user982
The high and highly detailed predictability of individual dog behavior from
breed alone is interesting and, particularly given many breeds' relative
youth, heavily weights the nature/nurture debate in the former's favor for me.

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pjc50
.. for dogs. Don't let that encourage you to over-generalise about humans.

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TheSpiceIsLife
Why should it not also be the case with humans? Sure sure, our environment,
development, nutrition, family bonding, etc, all has an effect on our
intelligence.

Dog breeding is just a euphemism for _eugenics_.

Presumably all domestic dogs are descendents of one species of wild dog, so
given that:

Give me ~12,000 years and I'm willing to bet I can give you a breed of super
intelligent humans (Border Collies) and a breed dumb dumbs (Bulldogs).

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LeifCarrotson
I don't doubt that you could succeed in breeding humans, but I think that
there are two ENORMOUS roadblocks that ought to be mentioned:

1\. The Ethics Problem. Puppy mills are still around and still bad, and
breeders in the past probably did some pretty terrible things to their dogs,
but the human analog of the work performed by even the most humane dog
breeders would still be a terrible travesty of the most basic human rights.
Maybe I'm not creative enough or open-minded enough, but I can't conceive of a
way to do this ethically.

2\. The Nurture Option. A well-trained bulldog can be a much, much better dog
than an untrained border collie. And one person can accomplish this training
with a dog in a few years. Why spend 12,000 years breeding humans instead of
putting a bit more effort into training the perfectly serviceable brains that
we already have?

I tried to find some statistics to back up the latter point. The US spends
about 2.7%, or 102 billion of the 3800 billion federal budget, on education.
States average about 30% of their budgets, or (very roughly) 550 billion of
the 1850 billion sum of state budgets, on education. A further complication is
that much of education funding is done using local property taxes, which vary
wildly by location, but are generally similar to the sum of federal and state
funding. This is a total of about 1.2 trillion in education funding. Honestly,
that compares pretty favorably to a 19 trillion GDP. And it ignores all the
extremely important effort and money spent by parents to educate their
children, and private spending on post-secondary education.

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halloij
2\. The problem here is that you can't train a bulldog to herd sheep. You
can't train a poodle to be a livestock guardian.

Much of what working dogs do is pre-programmed. It's instinctive. Very little
(if any) training is required.

Why try to train things to be things they were not already designed to be?
It's FAR more efficient to breed the traits and instinct you want into a
breed.

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undersuit
Are you trying to make some kind of analogy to humans being limited to a
certain skill set because of genetics? I hope I just reading too much into
your reply to this thread.

Anyways, you can train poodles to be livestock guardians.
[http://www.vipoodle.org/HRP/VIP_herdingpoodles.html](http://www.vipoodle.org/HRP/VIP_herdingpoodles.html)

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adrianN
Are you implying that every human can do everything equally well? Talent is a
thing. I wouldn't beat Usain Bolt no matter how much I trained.

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undersuit
No, but I'm not implying that you can't train up to the 95% percentile. Not
every dog can be Balthazar[1], but almost every single dog can be trained to
sit. Not every human can be Albert Einstein, but almost every single one of
them can learn Calculus.

[1][http://metro.co.uk/2017/04/23/britains-biggest-dog-is-7ft-
an...](http://metro.co.uk/2017/04/23/britains-biggest-dog-is-7ft-and-weighs-
the-same-as-a-baby-elephant-6593159/)

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frabbit
Beautiful cladogram

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albertgoeswoof
woof

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gpvos
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

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rukuu001
Unless it's HN, then everyone knows.

