A look that seeks ours, a nose that comes asking for a caress, a dog that follows us from one room to another… Their desire to stay close to us sometimes seems innate. But does this tremendous sociability come only from their education and their long history with humans, or is there also a genetic part? To try to understand it, researchers from the University of Princeton compared the behavior of domestic dogs to that of wolves socialized to humans, looking for differences that could explain this particular proximity to us.
Could a piece of DNA explain the sociability of dogs?
To understand whether the famous “man's best friend” also owed part of his character to his genes, the researchers compared the behavior of 18 domestic dogs and 10 gray wolves socialized with humans, focusing in particular on their tendency to seek human proximity. They particularly studied a region of the canine genome already associated with sociability, corresponding to an area of the human genome involved in the syndrome of Williams-Beurena neurodevelopmental disorder particularly associated with stereotypical hypersociability.
In dogs, scientists were particularly interested in the GTF2I and GTF2IRD1 genes, as well as the WBSCR17 gene, located in this region. And, indeed, some structural DNA variations observed in dogs were indeed associated with differences in sociability. The idea is obviously not that dogs are affected by the syndrome of Williams-Beurenbut rather that a comparable genetic region could participate in their social behavior.
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Are dogs “programmed” to love humans?
However, it is impossible to summarize the attachment of dogs to humans with 1 or 2 genes. Their behavior is the result of a complex combination of genetics, environment, experiences and upbringing.
The interest of this study published in Science Advances* is elsewhere: it suggests that domestication could have shaped certain behavioral traits, and not just the appearance of our companions.
Over the generations, the dogs most at ease with humans could thus have been favored, as if they had been progressively selected to be particularly good at living alongside us. So, behind this ball of fur that seeks your gaze, comes to ask for a caress or follows you everywhere, there may be hidden an evolutionary history dating back several thousand years.
* Bridgett M. vonHoldt et al., “Structural variants in genes associated with human Williams-Beuren syndrome underlie stereotypical hypersociability in domestic dogs”, Science Advances, 19 Jul 2017, Vol 3, Issue 7.