81–90 of 191 posts
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Just straight up linking to a dog whistle sub... okay...
What's wrong with the sub?
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Not thousands, more like 150.
This is very wrong, there have been clearly defined dog breeds for thousands of years: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/mi...
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Lots more details from the authors on twitter. https://twitter.com/eenork/status/1520450288095797251
The author says "We found no support for policies targeting particular breeds" [1] which is completely absurd even if you postulate that their study's results were even stronger than they are. Imagine that their study found zero correlation between breeds and behavior. Even if that were the case, the outcomes of that behavior are wildly different. Some breeds will bite you and not even break skin. Some breeds will bi…
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The fact that people believe this demonstrates an egregious misunderstanding of how genetics works. People have never been "bred" in any meaningful sense (e.g. for a long enough or in a consistently isolated way for selection to be relevant) in human history.
> a consistently isolated 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 S…
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I can think of 4 things that would make a science-based discussion around those sensitive topics more palatable: 1) All data is in distributions, and so no predictions can be made about an individual based on distributions. 2) "Better" is a meaningless term in these discussions. 3) Any traits are the result of optimization for a particular environment. 4) Everyone should be treated with respect.
> 1) All data is in distributions, and so no predictions can be made about an individual based on distributions. Good luck with getting people to accept that. It is obvious to any statistician, but I have had arguments with experienced researches who cannot grasp this simple fact
If I hear that someone is 12 years old and I know nothing else about them, then assuming their height is the mode for that age group is as good of a prediction as you can make.
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The fact that people believe this demonstrates an egregious misunderstanding of how genetics works. People have never been "bred" in any meaningful sense (e.g. for a long enough or in a consistently isolated way for selection to be relevant) in human history.
What does being bred have to do with the pattern of genetics influencing behavior? Are you saying there aren’t enough differences in human genetics to allow us to group them in a meaningful way?
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Ok, since you don't think a 6 year old can play with any dog unsupervised, how about a 12 year old? Would you let a 12 year old play unsupervised with a pit bull? How about with a chihuahua?
Depends on the dog, depends on the child. As per the paper, breed is a poor predictor of behaviour. I wouldn't let most adults in this thread play with my dogs unsupervised, based on the state of the comments.
Isn't this study flawed because they asked people to report on their dog's behavior? When I talk to other dog owners, they discuss the dog with respect to their perceived breed standard, "Oh, Kelly is much more calm than I expected from a Rotty" or "Joy is pretty dumb for a Collie." If they somehow got neutral observers that would be much more persuasive, in my mind.
It isn't flawed, it's straight up garbage. The fact that the authors are preferring twitter to have a conversation about the study is pretty telling as well. No idea how they got into Nature, I thought it was supposed to be a respectable journal?
Prominent journal is a better way to describe it. They have a well known sensationalism bias (as does Science. This is the reason both journals are so widely recognized.)
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> a consistently isolated 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 S…
None of this is true, there are no known human subspecies, not to mention human subspecies differentiated by geography.
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.