Man is best friend

Nice guys finish last right?

Certainly, nice dogs don’t.

We love our dogs not because they are smart or high-achievers, but but because we can count on their love without at doubt.

New evidence is mounting on the biology behind this love. Researchers compared the genomes of dogs and wolves (raised by humans). The much friendlier dogs showed more variation in a certain stretch of their genome. Dogs also develop to maturity more slowly than wolves do.

This section of the genome is present in humans too. And variation in it is associated with a condition called Williams Syndrome. People with Williams are stereotypically indiscriminately and extremely friendly, sometimes treating strangers like they are their best friend. They are also often below average in visual-spatial intelligence, and develop more slowly.

Sound familiar?

It’s possible that the key behavioral traits we love in dogs are the result of the analog of this genetic syndrome in humans. So extreme niceness may not be a deficiency, but the key adaptation which has driven these canines’ success.

There may be a direct lesson from this that applies to human evolution too. We tend to think of homo sapiens as successful because we have greater intelligence than other animals. Often we think of tool-use and abstract reasoning when we cite this.

But data suggests our close cousins neandertals appear to have had brains that are larger than ours in the areas associated with tool-use and visual-spatial cognition. And we know that humans and neanderthals interbred. Now we also have data suggesting that people who have more neanderthal DNA display skull characteristics more similar to them. We might guess that their cognitive characteristics will be more similar to neanderthals as well.

But the really tantalizing theory is that the key characteristics that led us to our-compete neanderthals was not tool-use at all. Perhaps it was our sociability. Much as we see in Williams Syndrome, perhaps there’s a trade off between abstract reasoning and social intelligence. And it was human’s friendliness and social coordination that allowed us to outpace the perhaps more calculating but less friendly neanderthals.

Perhaps we won due to the very same genes that make dogs our best friend. Perhaps success is being a best friend.

Certainly there is not enough evidence to conclude this today. But it is an interesting, plausible, and heartening theory.