A wagging tail, slobbery kisses, and excited yaps. These are only a few of the things humans love so much about dogs. As a dog owner and lover myself, I know this well! There’s no doubt that dogs are some of the friendliest critters around — but what exactly is it that makes our beloved canines so friendly?
Scientists recently claimed to have pinpointed the genetic answer to this question. Using humans with a genetic disorder that makes them overly friendly as a guideline, a team of researchers identified peculiarities in multiple genes that make dogs more gregarious than their ancestral counterparts, wolves. Additionally, these genetic alterations were found to be what makes some dog breeds friendlier than others.
Seven years ago, Bridgett vonHoldt, a geneticist from Princeton University, joined with Monique Udell, an animal behaviorist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, to find connections in genes to the trait that was such a game-changing factor in the decision by prehistoric humans to domesticate dogs: hypersociality.
After confirming that dogs are hypersocial to wolves by comparing how 18 different breed dogs and 10 hand-raised wolves reacted in encounters with humans, vonHoldt and Udell switched gears and scrutinized the each seemingly trivial detail about people with Williams-Beuren syndrome, the developmental disorder that leads to an elf-like appearance and mental slowness but also makes a person very amiable and trusting. VonHoldt opted to hone in on the fact that Williams-Beuren is caused by an incomplete chromosome 7 because in prior studies, she had discovered that dogs have a similar circumstance (in their case, this applies to chromosome 6) that has been significant in the species’ evolution.
What vonHoldt did next was a long shot: seeking even more knowledge, she decided to find out whether this DNA in humans is also responsible for the friendly nature of canines. The results? She was correct! The DNA widely varied among the different dogs tested on (and among the wolves as well, though to a lesser degree), with numerous parts having been added on, taken off, or duplicated. Similar variations were observed in people with Williams-Beuren and found to influence the degree of the disease’s severity – vonHoldt soon found that the same holds true for dogs and wolves: the amount of DNA disruptions directly correlates with the animal’s hypersociality. It’s interesting that the DNA that causes a disease in humans creates a desirable trait in dogs!
It’s also exciting to think that this is only the beginning of the studies of canine friendliness. While people have conducted — and are continuing to conduct — many studies on canines, few focus on behavior. To that end, the points being made by vonHoldt and Udell are still not so much conclusions as they are suggestions.
Perhaps someday soon, that is subject to change.
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