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9 percent of behavioral variation explained by breed verified

How much breed predicts individual dog behaviour: Darwin's Ark citizen-science genomics study

as of 2026-09-07 · license: facts-only

  • Owner-survey behavioural data plus genotyping of a subset (2,155 of 18,385 dogs); a citizen-science convenience sample, not a random sample of all dogs.
  • Registry temperament-blurb claims about specific breeds are not measurements; this figure is the study's own estimate of how much of the variation *between individual dogs* breed accounts for, which is small.

Source

American Association for the Advancement of Science (Science) — Morrill K, Hekman J, Li X, et al. (2022). Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes. Science 376(6592):eabk0639.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0639
retrieved 2026-09-07

Method

Quoted verbatim from the source above.

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