“’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.

Funny, but I’m not laughing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology

We are all Africans. I fucking love science.