Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution

The authors are trained ethologists with a life-long interest in dogs. Their views are also shaped by visiting and studying dogs in many parts of the world. That's further enriched by their experience in training and working with many different types of dogs -- in particular, herding dogs and herd guard dogs, sled dogs, and village dogs.Ethology is a branch of biology that studies animal behavior. It emphasizes evolutionary principles in behavior, often identifying continuity and change in patterns from studying closely related species. It also emphasizes studying the behavior in the natural context or setting. (Comparative psychology, by contrast, had grown to primarily favor the laboratory method and setting -- until the revolution of ethology and Eckhard Hess's work shook it up.)This book is a work for the serious student of canine behavior but written in a style that's readable by anyone with an interest in a scientific approach to and understanding of dogs. It greatly expands (and makes far more readable) the material in the Coppinger & Schneider chapter in "The Domestic Dog", James Serpell (Ed.) published six years earlier, but it also extends it into other areas.Its most important thesis is that dogs probably derived from wolf-like animals which hung around mesolithic villages and were scavengers, quite similar to "village dogs" in many parts of the world. They were not wolves, captured as puppies and then tamed. Wolves do NOT ever become tame or trainable. I found their argument on these point to be extremely convincing.The serious student of dogs will also find their ethological observations and comparisons of dogs valuable.Despite its great worth and contribution, the book is not without some petty flaws.I'd have liked more discussion on how the sequence of actions, like beads on a string, of orient/ eye-stalk/ chase/ grab-bite/ kill-bite/ dissect/ consume becomes fragmented so that some elements disappear while others remain. And how the differences arise for different dog "types". As ethologists, they know that there are many different behavior sequences in a species of which the predatory game killing pattern is only one. What about various social behaviors? Play behavior? Reproductive behavior? Adult attitude toward puppies?I became frustrated at the authors' lapses in consideration for their readers in their word usage, "transhumance" being one example. They used it several times before it was ever defined. It means the shepherds or drovers making seasonal migrations with their flocks in the Mediterranean region. Either explain it sooner or, even better, use terms familiar to English speaking readers. (On a websearch for "transhumance," the first 30 hits were all French except one, translated into English, from a Swedish university.The authors' descriptions of genetic processes are neither models of exposition or of clarity. E.g., I think once a claim was made that a behavior cannot be genetically controlled because there are alleles at the same locus. (An allele is a gene's partner at the same locus on the companion chromosome.) In a single gene model, one can, for example, have a dominant or recessive gene as an allele. That makes it not genetic? The reader interested in genetics should not look to this book for understanding. Use a basic college biology text.Another example is discussing how experience "shapes" the developing neurological "wiring". But "shape" then becomes so often used as a noun, and such a big deal is made about it altering the shape of the brain, that I found myself writing in the margin, "Are they reintroducing phrenology??!!" (Phrenology was the pseudo-science popular in the early 1800s; it purported that the abilities, characters, and deficits of a person could be ascertained from the bumps and valleys on the skull since the skull would reflect the underlying volume of the brain.) Basic introductory tests in psychology will cover this relation between early experience and brain function far more clearly.The authors rile some sacred cows, possibly deliberately, perhaps to provoke discussion (and maybe controversy and publicity?).They take aim at restricting the gene pool in AKC registered breeds. This gradually develops more genetic abnormalities and health problems -- eyes, hips, skin conditions, etc. Also, theysuggest that AKC breed clubs, by presenting a picture of the ideal dog with little or no behavioral measures of excellence, inevitably tend to accentuate some characteristics more and more. This leads working dogs to lose their superior abilities in some areas and become unhealthy caricatures of their ancestors. The bulldog, with continual respiratory problems and unable to breed on its own, is given as an extreme example. This is a worthwhile topic to discuss, IMO.They also question whether people are dogs' best friends or are dogs being used as robots or slaves. While they raise some interesting questions in this area they give no answers. (I found myself wondering, would they include or exclude themselves -- and their history of dog ownership and use -- from such an indictment?) But also a worthwhile topic for discussion.

The Coppingers close their book with what they consider to be "great advice": "Don't forget, they are only dogs." Those words sum up this book.Looking at the dog from a narrowly Darwinian perspective, the authors propose that the dog (and, apparently, we ourselves) are nothing but a bundle of biological needs which evolutionary forces are compelling us to fulfill. Dogs use us, we use them--and that's OK, the authors say, as long as this using is mutual (i.e., there's a semblance of "consent").Of course, there's truth to this argument; dogs DO need us, and that has a lot to do with why they bond with us. But is that ALL there is to the relationship? The authors seem convinced that IS all.Only a thoroughgoing Darwinian evolutionist could buy this argument--and I don't, but not just because of wishful thinking. Not only do I wish there would be more to relationships in this life, but I have HOPE that because a Creator God put us on this earth, he's instilled people with a capacity for altruistic love and given us intrinsic (not just instrumental) value--and just maybe dogs, whose social interactions and emotions are in some ways like our own, are capable of some altruistic love, too.This book is full of moral and cultural relativism that condemns judgment ("No culture is more advanced that another; they're just different") yet at the same time, the authors lapse into some pretty strong moral prescriptions of their own about what they consider ethically binding in a dog-human relationship. Why should we care about any idea of ethics in a world that's driven by nothing more than the "selfish gene"?I love dogs and did learn some things about them from this book, but all in all, the book was disappointingly reductionistic.

Simply put, this book is an immense disappointment. While branded as a biological perspective on the dog's evolution and origin, this work has negligible scientific basis. The vast majority of the text is unfounded speculation, fueled only by the author's anecdotal experience and opinions and rife with logical fallacy. I was expected these scientists to provide evidence and reason as the backbone of their claims, yet find almost nothing of the sort.As an example. the Coppinger's provide themselves, in their argument for the natural selection of the dog around early human settlement, an obvious straw man as a counterpoint. They say the opposing view is that the training of wolves to be tamer led to the domestication of the dog. I have never heard this. An accurate counterpoint to natural selection would be the artificial selection of more docile wolves among early human settlements. The result of this methodology can be seen in Belyaev's silver foxes, and so dog-like traits arise in foxes selected only for docility. Yet the Coppingers stubbornly insist that their opposition can only be claiming that dogs were domesticated by training, rather than selection. Strange.To be fair, personally I believe it more likely that dogs arose from natural selection around human populations as well. However, neither discovery nor science will be fostered by these kinds of misleading arguments.The book is interesting, if you can bear it and parse out which information is likely to be grounded and which is not. I do not personally fall into that category. That said, the authors do show an immense love of dogs.

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立ち読みが出来なかった為か、書籍の内容については不満が残りました。部分的にでも、立ち読みが出来るようなシステムが欲しいですね。