Many genes associated with dog behavior influence human personalities, too

Summary

Well, it’s complicated The same thing happened when the researchers looked at the regions that contain the equivalent genes in humans. “For example, the gene nearest the dog-directed aggression locus,” the authors write, “is associated in humans with intelligence, cognitive performance, educational attainment, and major depressive disorder.” In total, the researchers identified a dozen sites that were associated with behavioral differences in both humans and dogs. Some of them made more sense than the example immediately above; for example, a genomic region associated with fear in dogs has had its human version linked to neuroticism and anxiety. Others get rather complex. A region near a gene called ROMO1 was linked to responding well to training in dogs. In humans, it has been associated with cognitive performance—which you can kind of see as connected—but also depression and irritability. So, in short, the study identified a number of genes with a common function in behavior, likely conserved widely across mammals. But at the same time, it has generally failed to find a similar conservation of the specific behaviors that are being conserved, even across different dog breeds. There are some caveats here. One is that the behavior ratings came from the dogs’ owners, which may have aspects of their own behavior that influence their interactions with their dogs or their interpretations of the dogs’ actions. In addition, the dogs may have been brought up in quite different environments. It’s hard to understand how this would create a spurious bias toward any particular genetic association, though a larger population should limit its impact. The alternative is that many of these variants create what you might consider a point of flexibility for the nervous system. But other factors, either genetic or environmental, can bias that flexibility to specific destinations. And it’s important to note that, while we tend to think of “environmental factors” as things like chemical...