Not about bees, but continuing the thread about perceptions of ancestry in breeds

What Breeds Make Up This Mutt?
Experts did little better than dog lovers — and nobody did very well — when asked to describe the heritage of various mutts.

The MuttMix Project Survey, is a scientific quiz conducted by Darwin’s Dogs, a program run out of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants.

The researchers set up an online survey with pictures and video of 31 mutts, and participants were asked to guess the top three purebred strains comprising each one. The scientists waited two months to release the results.  Recently every participant got an email telling them how poorly they did. Pretty much everyone did poorly.

This was a really hard survey, like a test in high school French for which you have to know the subjunctive. I happen to know that you can wander around France and make yourself understood and catch at least a quarter of what people are saying with absolutely no use of the subjunctive. And that was pretty much the average accuracy of people participating in the survey: 25 percent.  Self-identified dog professionals did a bit better, barely. Their accuracy was 28 percent.

The survey is part of the Broad Institute’s studies of the genetics of dogs and the attitudes of people toward them. Researchers hope the results will help them better understand how “people evaluate and perceive mixed-breed dogs.” So far, the results show that we certainly don’t perceive their heritage very well.

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