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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: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:29AM (4 children)

    by stormwyrm (717) on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:29AM (#857276) Journal

    Humans selected them as a desirable trait.

    So artificial selection then, still evolution. The needs and desires of humans form an additional selection pressure on a species that we come into contact with. Everything that humans have domesticated exhibits the same thing. Before human domestication, bananas looked like this [wikimedia.org]. But humans had selected those bananas that didn't have those nasty, inedible seeds and propagated them. So too with domestic dogs. Humans kept and fed and and allowed to reproduce those dogs that exhibited desirable traits, like the ability to make those puppy dog eyes. That's still pretty much evolution, any way you slice it. Nothing about evolution is predicated on the selection pressures being "natural".

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  • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:49AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:49AM (#857283)

    So how do you explain crab apples? Checkmates athiest.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:19AM (#857297)
      Crab apples are a wild species that is partly ancestral to the lineage of modern apple cultivars, similar to the seeded wild bananas mentioned. Asking how come there are still crab apples is like asking If humans descended from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys? [rationalwiki.org] And by the way, people actually do eat crab apples. When cooked they are said to have a better flavour than the sweeter apple cultivars that are generally eaten raw. So if people like them just the way they are, they will be propagated by people just the way they are.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @10:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @10:14AM (#857384)
      Same way you're still stupider than a chimp.
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:27PM

      by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:27PM (#857470)

      Well, first, a crab fucked an apple...

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