Breeding philosophy - Page 9

Bz, I did read it and it supports everything I said, you were and still are wrong. Also, you are picking one example, and ignoring the rest of my statement. Besides, what you are saying about the clones is absolutely incorrect...product of your misquoting and taking things from an interview out of context. Regardless, its nice of see you are capable of learning things that you previously thought impossible. That's all I have to say, don't want to derail. Just remember how a narrow mind closes one from learning.

LOL, whatever.  Have fun over there.

Bz, remember your insult to me when you said learned behavior can't be bundled up and stuffed into a single cell and passed on to the next generation? .......you evolved, science has Known learned behavior can be passed on for decades, it was called race memory, I learned about it fifty years ago.

Read the study Joan.  It is the activation of a gene.  Read it for real this time. 

Your whole statement that science has known this for decades shows that you haven't read any of the links.  This is new, not 50 year old info.

 

 

So I looked at the mice study and I find that extremely interesting and will definitely look into it some more.  I was disappointed that I couldn't review the entire actual study without paying for it.  In the second link, I thought it was quite a stretch to jump from low birth weights in the children and grandchildren of those that lived through the Dutch famine (totally expected since a famine would cause poor physical health and that affects your reproduction of healthy offspring) to the DNA of mice being changed by a fearful experience. 

From my quick reading, I did not see how epigenetics proved that the traits I believe make up the whole of temperament are changed environmentally.   Please explain it to me since I can be thick headed sometimes.   How does the mice study show that a dog's hardness, biddability, resilience or nerve (since these are the traits that we have focused on) can be changed at the genetic level, environmentally.  The mice learned to avoid a certain smell and the supposedly altered the genes so that their offspring avoided that smell, but I don't see that affecting the traits of temperament.  I looked (albeit very quickly) at more information about epigenetics and didn't see anything that pointed directly to changes in the actual "nature" of a subject due to epigenetics.

Thank you for the information.  I do enjoy learning and reading more all of the time.  I have been using my current model of evaluating temperaments for 16 years now and it has always worked very well to give me the information I need to develop a training program for those individual dogs.  There is always room for improvement though. 

The book will help with that correlating it to people.

Quick answer though.  In the study the mice didn't avoid the smell.  It was used to condition a fear response.  Then the fear response was used a means to measure the transfer.  What it did was activate the genes that are used to detect the chemical (not the smell) and they measured this through the fear response.  (F1 and F2 generations).  This is a limited one to one study.  one small piece introduced and evaluated one small piece (the gene receptors for the chemical). 

How it possibly relates to dogs is the response a dog feels to pain (pinch collar stimulation).  If we condition the dog (saturate the gene so that it is expressed) thru training to take this as drive rather than correction, we create a dog who comes up in drive rather than down and hence becomes more resilient to pressure which can then be passed on to the next generation. 

Understand (joan doesn't) this does NOT mean that we can transfer entire multifaceted behaviors such as a retrieve, or barking (or bucking for that matter).  Too many genes involved.  At least at this point in the research. 

 

LIke I said earlier, you've done a lot of thinking on this stuff and I feel that you have a good grasp of everything.  You and I are talking minor differences.

 

Nice discussion

Bz, you still don't get why animals buck, do you? And that the reason they buck is passed on genetically, and manifests in behavior...but that is OK that you don't get it, the people breeding bulls to buck do understand and are successful. As for barking, that is what dogs do, silly person, unless they are basinjis. And you never heard of Labrador RETREIVERS and Golden RETRIEVERS? The propensity to retrieve is genetic, that's why those breeds were named "retrievers". But now you are claiming, even tho you say I'm wrong in professing bucking is genetic, that just the act of USING a prong on a dog is going "saturate" the genes to change the DNA in that dog and create offspring with higher drive? Yeah, sure, not too many genes involved there....must be osmosis causing the "saturation". Lol. But carry on.

This coming from someone who honestly suggested that a dog aggressive dog who is required to wear a muzzle by AC should just show for a BH wearing the muzzle.  Some will never understand.  Just the way it is which is why I'm no longer a TD.  I don't have to put up with those who can't learn.