INVENTING THE DOG, CANIS FAMILIARIS

It once seemed as if the dog was a triumphant early human invention, our first domesticated animal many thousands of years ago, a deliberate product of ancient Homo sap ingenuity that has done us proud down through the millenia.

But now it appears as if dogs may not be evidence of paleolithic human cleverness after all. Perhaps, new research argues, the incipient dog was a genetic accident that we stumbled upon. Maybe dogs are just mutant wolves with a genetically based developmental disorder that we simply seized on and exploited.

In humans, that genetically based developmental disorder features behavior known as hypersociability. Extreme friendliness and a naively trusting nature are well-known doggy traits, but they are also traits of people with Williams syndrome (aka Williams-Beuren syndrome). People with the syndrome also experience developmental problems, mental disability, cardiovascular abnormalities, and a characteristic facial appearance, especially in childhood, sometimes described as “pixielike.”

Williams syndrome has been traced to losses and other variations in a chunk of human chromosome 7 that contains a couple dozen genes. The analogous area is on dog chromosome 6, and it features assorted DNA insertions, deletions and duplications in both dogs and wolves. “People with Williams-Beuren also show great variation in this region, and the variation is thought to affect the severity of the disease and people’s personalities,” according to Elizabeth Pennisi at Science.

The researchers compared 18 dogs with 10 captive hand-raised wolves.  Hypersocial dogs had more DNA disruptions in the relevant chromosome area than the tame but less sociable wolves, the researchers report in Science Advances. Note, however, that this was a (relatively) small study. Commentators, though largely enthusiastic about the results, pointed that out, and called for–wait for it–more research.

In particular disruption of the gene that codes for a master regulator protein called GIF21 was associated with the most social dogs. A relative lack of changes in that gene seems to lead to less sociability. In mice, mutations in that gene are also associated with mouse hypersociality. Variations in two other genes in the region also linked to sociability in dogs.

Personality traits like friendliness are probably shaped by hundreds or thousands of genes, but these three genes appeared to play a surprisingly large role in controlling social behavior, said Nala Rogers at InsideScience. “We may have bred a behavioral syndrome into a companion animal,” first author Bridgett von Holdt told Carrie Arnold at National Geographic.

The study included a test of the strength of human-canid relationships that also worked as a kind of intelligence test, possibly an inadvertent one. As described by Dan Robitzski at Inverse, the dogs and wolves were challenged by being given a piece of summer sausage in a box they had to open. If a human was seated quietly nearby, dogs tended to pay attention to the human, not the treat box, whereas the tame wolves tended to focus on the box task rather than the person. If no human was nearby, the wolves opened the box relatively easily. The dogs had a harder time obtaining the treat.

The moral of this story: Compared to wolves, dogs may be sweet-tempered and loving. But–let’s be frank here–they are also not so bright. That’s actually common in domestication. We breed our domestic animals to be stupid and docile. Dogs included.

Just a few weeks ago I wrote here at On Science Blogs about genetic evidence supporting the idea that the domestic cat is not a human invention either. Cats, it appears, owe their enormous evolutionary success to having exploited Homo sap by domesticating themselves. Likewise, the dog-wolf findings are a big boost to the self-domestication theory of dog evolution, evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare told Ashley Yeager at Science News.

“This is another piece of the puzzle suggesting that humans did not create dogs intentionally, but instead wolves that were friendliest toward humans were at an evolutionary advantage as our two species began to interact.”

MARYAM MIRZAKHANI AND MATHEMATICS

All the obits point out first thing that she is the only woman to win the Fields Medal, often called math’s Nobel equivalent (even though it goes to young–youngish–mathematicians.) At the 2014 awards ceremony in Seoul, Siobhan Roberts recounts at the New Yorker, Maryam Mirzakhani was already sick with the breast cancer that killed her July 14 at the shockingly young age of 40.

She left the ceremony early, without giving her scheduled lecture. Was she too ill, or just, as was habitual with her, very reserved and private? Female colleagues tried to protect her from the media, which was eager to use her sex as a way of writing about math without writing about math.

Me too. I’m utterly unequipped to talk about Mirzakhani’s math, so I’ll leave it to others. “Her work focused on curved surfaces – such as spheres or donut shapes – and how to understand their properties. Her achievements have applications in other fields of science including quantum field theory, engineering and material science, and could even influence theories around how our universe was born,” said Mehrdokht Pournader at The Conversation. I’ll take her word for it. There’s a short video of Mirzakhani teaching accompanying this post.

Everyone speaks of how modest she was, but she was also, inevitably, a role model. Sure she was brilliant, of course she was. But to get to the very top of a field of science requires a lot more than mere brilliance. Especially for a girl.

It’s hard to comprehend the degree of Mirzakhani’s–what? Grit? Sticktoitiveness? Strength of will? She must have been indomitable. I worry that getting where she got forced her to use it all up. Maybe she had no more left to beat the breast cancer too.

A role model for girls and women surely, and for Iranian women in particular. But also, apparently, for the Iranian nation, not known for elevating women. At the Atlantic, Sigal Samuel writes that  many Iranian newspapers treated her like a national hero and put her hijabless image on the front page.  A terrific photo demonstrates the fact. A first. (OTOH, some papers also obscured her bare head with added background, or even photoshopped a headcovering in. Or ran no photo at all.)

We are advised not to interpret the several undoctored photos as a breakthrough. Apparently an uncovered female head doesn’t count as a doctrinal matter when the head is dead.