Gene And Behavior: A Comlex Relationship
...while I was kneeling to trim some rose bushes early this summer. He was largemore so for being at eye leveland he was wearing a collar made of chain links large enough to anchor a small ship. I turned to face him as an archive of rottweiler news stories came up from long-term memory, none of them happy, all of them populated by mutilated people and by dogs destroyed at the direction of the authorities.
What to do next? How did I appear to this animal? Did I look like a threat? Did I look like lunch? He certainly wasn't behaving in a menacing manner, but maybe he was waiting for the right moment to express his breed's well-known, vicious disposition. One of us had to do something, I figured, although reason, the pride of Homo sapiens, was little comfort in the face of the evolutionary legacy of Canis familiaris: powerful jaws and teeth adapted to gripping and tearing. I extended my hand slowly, andhe licked it. The dog worked his way up to my face with a tongue as broad and soggy as a kitchen sponge, and, as his owner appeared, I expressed my relief at seeing such friendly behavior from a representative of so notorious a breed. The young man replied, "These dogs get a bad rap. People say they're born mean. Look at Caesar, here. Ain't no dog born mean. You got to teach them to be mean."
In their different ways, Caesar and his human friend raised long-standing questions about the roots of animal behavior, including behavior in our own species. Are behaviors inbred, written indelibly in our genes as immutable biological imperatives, or is the environment more important in shaping our thoughts and actions? Such questions cycle through society repeatedly, forming the public nexus of the "nature vs. nurture controversy," a strange locution to biologists, who recognize that behaviors exist only in the context of environmental influence. Nonetheless, the debate flares...
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