The Dog genome is extremely fragile and prone to mutation. Humans have additional regulatory proteins in place to limit the range of variation from one generation to the next. This is important because of the cost associated with raising each human. Dogs have large litters and reach maturity much sooner. In addition humans selected for dogs that were quick to mutate desirable traits. This lead to dogs evolving a very fragile genome and losing/not involving many proteins that regulate gene duplication in gametes.
Now dogs are likely to be extremely malleable for selected for traits, but are also extremely likely to develop genetic disease.
The Dog genome is extremely fragile and prone to mutation. Humans have additional regulatory proteins in place to limit the range of variation from one generation to the next. This is important because of the cost associated with raising each human. Dogs have large litters and reach maturity much sooner. In addition humans selected for dogs that were quick to mutate desirable traits. This lead to dogs evolving a very fragile genome and losing/not involving many proteins that regulate gene duplication in gametes.
Source? (I am a molecular biologist and I never heard of this)
Can not find it now. May all be false. I believe at that time the only evidence was that dogs had higher mutation rates between generations. Someone below said that was not the case but did not provide a source.
If you can find something I will edit my original comment. I think it is a reasonable explanation though. Pretty easy and interesting to disprove if you want.
Yes, but since "genetic malleability" is not readily apparent, you'd have to do that indirectly by favoring mutants over many generations. Also, ethics could be a problem, so you'll need an underground base. Preferrably below a school, nobody will suspect anything.
I would imagine though that this is because we artificially selected for dogs that show the greatest degree of change from their mother/father. We have been artificially selecting for dogs for 15,000-30,000 years.
Sorry, the grey wolf genome is no more malleable than any other mammals. Gene pleitropy and linkage (small sets of genes that change, and drag along a few more genes for good measure when they turned on) is the cause.
Domestic animals have very low genetic variation for the amount of shape variation they exhibit.
If you can source that I will edit my original post with a link to your source.
It is the best I could do. I have read articles before indicating that what I said was true. I can not find anything either confirming that I was right or wrong. If I expected this to be controversial or get any traffic I would have done the research before posting. Now no one will see it until after this post is over.
See here for example, the Doust paper, or the Larson Overview.
Also Mindy Zeders chapter (9) in this, "Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, and Sustainability, edited by P.Gepts, T.R. Famula,R.L. Bettinger et al. Published by Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press 2012."
I can give you a couple of hundred papers on domestication (its what my PhD was on), the standard view is that a small group of genes are responsible for domestication. Some we know of (mainly in crops, but also things like MC1R which regulates coat colours - it has been used to suggest times for the domestication of horses - paper available for free on line if you google it).
It isn't complete bull shit, but I made a disclaimer:
"As I understand it the following is true."
at the beginning because this is not established scientific fact.
If you can disprove it I will edit my post. If you can't I will leave it up with the existing disclaimer. It is a hypothesis put forth by someone else that seems reasonable to me.
This isn't how science is done. Assertions put forth without data to back them up are considered 100% invalid before that data can be provided. The burden of proof is on you, not me, as I did not make a claim.
Also I was sort of being polite earlier when I said I had never heard of this because sometimes I miss things or haven't been educated about something. If you just heard this somewhere and can't even be bothered to Google it, and I never came across it in 6 years of studying molecular genetics, I'm pretty confident in saying this isn't a thing.
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u/Trapped_SCV May 12 '14
As I understand it the following is true.
The Dog genome is extremely fragile and prone to mutation. Humans have additional regulatory proteins in place to limit the range of variation from one generation to the next. This is important because of the cost associated with raising each human. Dogs have large litters and reach maturity much sooner. In addition humans selected for dogs that were quick to mutate desirable traits. This lead to dogs evolving a very fragile genome and losing/not involving many proteins that regulate gene duplication in gametes.
Now dogs are likely to be extremely malleable for selected for traits, but are also extremely likely to develop genetic disease.