Dog genetics!
by Alex
Here’s “a potential resource for teaching”:http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55869?fulltext=true — often times when I begin to ask my students about race and genetics one or two in the class will analogize human racial difference to dog breeds. At first I thought this was shocking, but over time I found it was a useful response — most students imagined dog breeds, like human racial difference, to be the result of evolution. But in fact variation in dog size is a classic example of culture shaping biology and not the other way around. Canine sexual reproduction is culturally organized (i.e. by breeders) just as human reproduction is shaped by cultural forces, and the incredible variation in size and shape of dogs dates only to the Victorian. And as “Rebecca Cassidy”:http://books.google.com/books?id=A-QYXw9Wl9YC&dq=sport+of+kings+rebecca+cassidy&pg=PP1&ots=DCnV7PcL2z&sig=iPNyFJAq1a6QuFm66w054CSIhQA&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Dsport%2Bof%2Bkings%2Brebecca%2Bcassidy%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26aq%3Dt%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title has shown, ‘breeding’ is a culturally-specific preoccupation which cuts across species, class, and (of course) ‘race’.