Because domestication was relatively recent, modern dog breeds live alongside ancient breeds, making comparison possible:
“About 80 percent of the dogs living on the planet today are what’s known as village dogs. These are free-ranging animals that live as human commensals. So they’re living within human society, but they’re not pets,” Hecht said.
Some initial findings from the lab include the discovery of neurological differences in dog breeds, including that premodern dogs on a whole have larger amygdala — the part of the brain that controls emotional processing and memory. Such heightened environmental-monitoring skills would come in handy for dogs deciding which humans to steal scraps from and which to avoid.
Modern dogs have a bigger neocortex — the part of the brain that controls motor function, perception, and reasoning. It may play a part in modern dogs’ increased behavioral flexibility, or ability to adapt to new environments.
Hecht’s lab connects personality and skill differences in dogs to six different parts of the brain: the regions controlling drive and reward; olfaction and taste; spatial navigation; social communication and coordination; fight or flight; and olfaction and vision
[…]
More than breed itself, pathways are impacted by a dog’s head shape and size. For example, Hecht’s lab has found that bigger dogs have larger neocortices than their smaller counterparts, and therefore generally are more trainable and less anxious. Dogs bred for their narrow skulls may see that impact their behavior.
“It stands to reason that if you’re manipulating the shape of a skull, you’re going to be manipulating the shape of the brain,” Hecht said.
As everyone knows, phrenology is a long-discredited pseudoscience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
We are all Africans. I fucking love science.
Funny how we’re making large advances in plant and animal science, carefully watched by APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service); while actively installing dysfunctional breeding protocols in the human population.
Funny, but I’m not laughing.
The article itself ends with a statement that is simply untenable in my experience:
“’Training is almost always necessary. I have yet to hear of any particular breed of working dog, where it’s just born knowing how to do its job,’ Hecht said.”
Such a statement would require a very narrow reading of, “born knowing.” I have yet to raise a Labrador that didn’t instinctually swim, retrieve, and return. Granted, it was an awfully crude form of this at first with some of them that required some serious sanding down of the rough edges, but all of the necessary components were there; usually the return was the part in most need of reinforcement, but even then the absolute worst case I had was that they would run to you, and then simply act like there was a 5 foot bubble around you, the need to return to sender was still present.
I don’t doubt that outliers exist, I even had a Chocolate once that would jump off of a 8 foot high dock to swim below the water, but Retrievers want to retrieve.
Also, the article pulls off an impressive rhetorical sleight of hand when it establishes:
Training > Skull Size > Breed > DNA, over the course of the entire article (making it hard to follow) as if 2/3 of those aren’t strongly dependent on the animals genetics.