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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 18 2019, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the can-I-have-a-treat-pleeeeease? dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

'Puppy Dog Eyes' May Have Evolved Just to Make Humans Melt - And It's Working

You know how when your dog wants something, she makes that face? You know the one - all beseeching, with eyes that seem to positively quiver with longing? You'd give her anything, right?

It turns out that our response to canine looks of longing or love may be the very reason dogs can make them. New research has found that the facial muscles involved in making these expressions can only be found in dogs, not wolves - suggesting our furry best friends evolved the ability specifically to communicate with humans.

"The findings suggest that expressive eyebrows in dogs may be a result of human unconscious preferences that influenced selection during domestication," said behavioural psychologist Juliane Kaminski of the University of Portsmouth.

"When dogs make the movement, it seems to elicit a strong desire in humans to look after them. This would give dogs that move their eyebrows more, a selection advantage over others and reinforce the 'puppy dog eyes' trait for future generations."

[...]For this research, the team did something different: they studied dog (Canis familiaris) behaviour as compared to wolves (C. lupus), and performed a comparative analysis of the facial anatomy of both species.

[...]"To determine whether this eyebrow movement is a result of evolution, we compared the facial anatomy and behaviour of these two species and found the muscle that allows for the eyebrow raise in dogs was, in wolves, a scant, irregular cluster of fibres," said anatomist Anne Burrows of Duquesne University.

"The raised inner eyebrow movement in dogs is driven by a muscle which doesn't consistently exist in their closest living relative, the wolf."

[...]The research has been published in PNAS.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Mer on Tuesday June 18 2019, @09:38PM (4 children)

    by Mer (8009) on Tuesday June 18 2019, @09:38PM (#857185)

    That's still evolution though. A very cursory understanding of the role of natural selection in evolution tells you that any kind of selection does the trick.
    GMOs we might not call evolution not because of the selection but because the gene horizontal transfert is artificial.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Tuesday June 18 2019, @10:34PM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 18 2019, @10:34PM (#857218) Journal

    Except that viruses have been doing horizontal gene transfer as part of the evolutionary process from near the beginning. (Before that genes could be shared between species directly, as some bacteria and archea still do.)

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    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:54PM (1 child)

      by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:54PM (#857253) Journal

      Could "GMO" be accurately defined as "induced horizontal gene transfer in multicellular eukaryotes"?

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:44AM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:44AM (#857266) Journal

        Not really. Sometimes the genes are designed rather than transferred horizontally. But most of current GMO fits your description.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:40PM (#857243)

    If we except the definition of evolution in my biology textbook here, "any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next", then GMO qualifies.