Media Attention and Grants Wag the Dog

Ed Yong at The Atlantic looks at the putative stories told about the origins of dogs.  

Dogs were domesticated so long ago, and have cross-bred so often with wolves and each other, that their genes are like "a completely homogenous bowl of soup,” [archaeologist and geneticist Greger Larson] tells me, in his office at the University of Oxford. “Somebody goes: What ingredients were added, in what proportion and in what order, to make that soup?” He shrugs his shoulders. “The patterns we see could have been created by 17 different narrative scenarios, and we have no way of discriminating between them.”

Larson argues that dogs were created from wolves twice.  

But why just twice?  

We know for a fact that wolf DNA is being injected into dog populations rather routinely, and that dog DNA is being injected into wolf populations just as often. 

And since geneticists can't agree (even a little bit) as to the mutation rate of dogs and wolves, the whole exercise is a pointless debate without end, and for no purpose other than to keep archeologists and geneticists employed and in grant money.  

Or, as Ed Young puts it:

Regardless of the exact date, it’s clear that over thousands of years, dogs have mated with each other, cross-bred with wolves, travelled over the world, and been deliberately bred by humans. The resulting ebb and flow of genes has turned their history into a muddy, turbid mess—the homogeneous soup...

What interesting is the story of how Gregor Larson came to study dogs.  Yes, he was simply chasing media attention and grant money.

The Big Dog Project was born of frustration. Back in 2011, Larson was working hard on the origin of domestic pigs, and became annoyed that scientists studying dogs were getting less rigorous papers in more prestigious journals simply because their subjects were that much more charismatic and media-friendly. So he called up his longstanding collaborator Keith Dobney. “Through gritted teeth, I said: We’re fucking doing dogs. And he said: I’m in.”

For more about all this (and pictures!), see an earlier post on this blog entitled The Wolf In the Dog House.