[Elinor Karlsson] Every time I told anyone that I was working on dogs,
the first thing they would do, was pull out their smartphone,
show me a picture of their dog,
and tell me all about it.
And I'm sitting there as a scientist going,
“that's all the information that I want is everything you just told me,
but it's not written down anywhere!”
Darwin's Ark is our community science project,
where we reach out directly to dog owners
and ask them to participate in our research.
[David Grimm] What we're increasingly seeing is science like this project,
which is a citizen science project,
where owners are more than happy to spend two hours in front of their
computer and answer 117 questions about their dog.
More than happy to get that q-tip and do the swab.
[Elinor Karlsson] I reached out to the community
of applied animal behavior experts.
These are people who work in things like dog training.
I said, “We're interested in traits that differ between breeds.
That were easy for owners to identify.
And that people were unlikely to try and train their dog to do it
or train their dog not to do it.”
Basically, we want things that are genetic, that are heritable.
And they came up with this fantastic list of questions.
[Dave Grimm] Does your dog like to play with toys?
And is your dog friendly with strangers?
But there were also questions like, does your dog circle before he poops?
When you have such a huge data set like this,
they're looking at descriptions of thousands of dogs,
and genome sequences of almost 2000 dogs,
stuff is going to start to shake out.
[Elinor Karlsson] We found out that behavior in dogs is very complicated,
which is not surprising–
behavior in everything is very complicated.
We had these behavioral factors that we scored each dog on.
And each factor is actually a bunch of different survey questions
that are all asking sort of the same thing.
What we saw out of these eight factors is
that there are a few of them,
like whether your dog was interested in playing with toys some of
and how trainable your dog was–
some of the breeds seem to be more different from
other dogs on those particular traits.
And then there were others that seemed to have
much less of a signal off of them.
One of the ones that didn't really seem to differ between breeds
much at all, the one that actually scored the lowest
out of those eight factors, was one that we called "agonistic threshold."
And that's the kind of set of questions,
it's all related to how your dog reacts to something
that's surprising or unexpected in their environment,
including whether they kind of react aggressively to it or not.
There doesn't really seem to be much there.
It seems like that's got a pretty large environmental component to it.
You can't really predict what an individual dog's behavior
is going to be like accurately, from their breed ancestry alone.
It's much too complicated.
[Dave Grimm] Most of the breeds we think of today,
whether it's German shepherds or Labrador Retrievers, or Border Collies,
trace back only about 160 years to the Victorian era,
where there was a lot of really intensive breeding for what dogs look like,
and dog shows were getting really popular.
[Elinor Karlsson] That's a very short period of time
in terms of evolution.
But it turns out that dogs were domesticated from wolves from wolves,
something like 10 or 20,000 years ago,
and so probably at some point, people started favoring dogs
that had behaviors that were useful to them.
Eventually, you had these kinds of working populations of dogs.
You have herding dogs, you have livestock guarding dogs,
you've got guard dogs,
and those have probably been around for a very long time.
If you start with a group of dogs that are bred
as a working population of herding dogs,
and you establish a breed from them,
you will have a population of dogs that are
more likely to have herding type behaviors.
One of the reasons that we study dog genetics at all,
is that we're interested in whether understanding how genes shaped behaviors
and behavioral disorders in dogs might actually help us
learn something about things like psychiatric diseases in people.
[Dave Grimm] Dogs look a lot different than us.
But they actually share the vast majority of their genes with us.
So it's always really surprising to sort of break down these species barriers,
and see how much we have in common.
They found a new region of dog DNA that seems to be involved with howling.
And it's related to a spot in human DNA that's involved in speech and language.
They found a new spot in dog DNA that seems to be related to human sociability,
which seems to be related to learning in humans.
[Elinor Karlsson] 2000 Dogs is a pretty remarkable number
to be able to do that with.
For context, in humans when they study complex behaviors,
they often need study sizes of hundreds of thousands,
and even millions of people.
I encourage everybody to go sign up for Darwin's Ark,
because the more dogs, the better at this point in time.
I remember somebody asked me once how many dogs I wanted.
And I said, "well, you know, ideally, all of them would be great."
[Dave Grimm] While this study is certainly surprising
and bound to be controversial,
even the authors admit, this is just the beginning.
And potentially with larger sample sizes,
they may start to see correlations that they’re not seeing now.
The more genetic information,
the more of a foothold other scientists are going to have
for teasing out these genes that are responsible for behavior
or potentially psychological issues or behavioral issues
and things like that, both in dogs and in people.
[Elinor Karlsson] Well, it's not really a secret anymore,
because I keep telling everybody,
but my dirty secret as a dog genetics person
was that I have never actually owned a dog.
I own three cats.
They are fantastic.
And I would love to have a cat genetics project one day