Wierd, I was just reading today about some dog stuff, retrievers,
pointers, setters, shepherds, terriers, poodles, bulldogs,
wolfhounds.. maybe the smell, naw..
Ginsburg and Scott both later went on to work with dogs, Scott proving
by crossing experiments between cocker spaniels and African basenjis
that play-fighting in puppies is controlled by two genes which
regulate the threshold for aggression. But science has not needed to
prove the inheritance of behavior in dogs: that was old news to dog
breeders. The point of dogs is that they come in different behavioral
types: retrievers, pointers, setters, shepherds, terriers, poodles,
bulldogs, wolfhounds-their very names denote the fact that they have
instincts bred into them. And those instincts are innate. A retriever
cannot be trained to guard livestock, and a guard dog cannot be
trained to herd sheep. It's been tried. In the process of
domestication, dogs have kept incomplete or exaggerated elements of
wolf behavior development. A wolf will stalk, chase, pounce, grab,
kill, dissect, and carry food, and a wolf pup will practice each of
these activities in turn as it grows up. Dogs are wolf pups frozen in
the practicing stage. Collies and pointers are stuck in the stalking
stage; retrievers are stuck with carrying and pit bulls with biting:
each is a frozen mixture of different themes seen in wolf pups. Is it
in their genes? Yes: "Breed-specific behaviors are irrefutable," says
the dog chronicler Stephen Budiansky.
Or ask the cattle-breeders. I have in front of me a catalog of dairy
bulls designed to entice me into ordering some semen by mail. In
enormous detail it describes the quality and shape of the bull's udder
and teats, its milk-producing ability, its milking speed and even its
temperament. But surely, you point out, bulls don't have udders? On
every page there is a picture of a cow, not a bull. What the catalog
is referring to is not the bull himself but his daughters. "Zidane,
the Italian No 1," it boasts, "improves frame traits and fixes on
tremendous rumps with ideal slope. He is particularly impressive in
his feet and leg composites with excellent set and terrific depth of
heel. He leaves faultless udders, which are snugly attached with deep
clefts." The characteristics are all female, but the attribution is to
the sire. Perhaps I would prefer to buy a straw of semen from
Terminator, whose daughters have "great teat placement," or Igniter, a
bull that is a "milking speed specialist" whose daughters "display
great dairy character." I might wish to avoid Moet Flirt Freeman,
because although his daughters have "tremendous width across the
chest" and give more milk than their mothers, the small print admits
that they are also slightly "below average" in temperament-which
probably means that they tend to kick out when being milked. They are
also slow milkers.
The point is that cattle-breeders have no qualms about attributing
behavior to genes, just as they attribute anatomy to genes. Minute
differences in the behavior of cows they confidendy ascribe to the
semen that arrived through the mail. Human beings are not cows.
Admitting instinct in cows does not prove that human beings are also
ruled by instinct, of course. But this admission does demolish the
assumption that because behavior is complex or subtle, it cannot be
instinctive. Such a comforting illusion is still widespread within the
social sciences, yet no zoologist who has studied animal behavior
could believe that complex behavior cannot be innate.
NATURE VIA NURTURE - genes, experience, and what makes us human
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060006781/
