Earlier this year I wrote about Cornell using federal stimulus money to fund research projects. Examples included $1 million spent on testing different strategies to encourage healthy eating among obese subjects and a $12.2 million dollar project that aimed to develop a social networking website for scientific collaboration. Probably not the best way to spend money on stimulating the economy, but at least these projects were halfway worthwhile. I’m not sure the same can’t be the same of this gem I stumbled upon today:
Cornell University scientists have received $296,385 in stimulus funds to study “dog domestication.” Researchers believe that there is common understanding of where dogs descended from, but the progression from there to Lassie “is poorly understood.” They point out that much of the research “has focused on breed dogs, but the diverse populations of semiferal ‘village’ dogs are likely an important key for understanding dog domestication.” A previous Cornell study found that North Africa was probably the origin of dog domestication. In that study, the scientists examined the genetic markers of 318 African dogs and then performed the same test of mixed breed American dogs and street dogs in Puerto Rico. The new study “will likely to [sic] challenge current theories of dog origins and develop village dogs into a useful system for the study of domestication, speciation, behavior and morphology.”
Hopefully $295,000 will be enough for Lassie to be “better understood.”
