About 4 years ago I gave a talk at a genomics conference in Novosibirsk. I asked to go to this facility and it was super interesting. They were also doing similar experiments on minks and a few other mammals. I was pretty surprised on how few generations it took, and the physical features changed pretty drastically as well. I'll see if I can dig up some old videos.
Great thinking point at the end:<p>"We always assume that intelligence is responsible for our success," says Hare. "That humans became smarter, which… allowed us to invent wheels and agriculture and iPhones. But what if that wasn't what happened?"<p>Hare suspects that, "like the foxes, and like dogs, we became friendlier first, and then got smarter by accident. This would mean that our prosocial skills, the skills that allow for cooperation and friendliness, were what made us successful."
An almost unrelated anecdote, but I was touring Russia in a bus, and the old lady in front of us had lived in Leningrad in the 1930's. Her father was a dog-keeper for professor Ivan Pavlov.<p>The said father was an "enemy of the people" (Article 58) due to his ethnicity, so he was allowed only second-rate jobs, but Pavlov and his dog research had enough standing even during the Purges to protect the dog-keeper. The daughter then survived Siege of Leningrad and later escaped to Finland, ending up in the bus with us to tour the old places and tell her remarkable story.
When I was at JCVI we tried to negotiate a plan to do a full genome sequencing of these foxes.<p>One of the more interesting discoveries - random piebaldness in animals (holsteins, pintos, salt and pepper dogs & cats) is almost exclusively found in domesticated animals and is probably related to genetic shifts in the expression of enzymes used to make dopamine, which is also the chemical precursor for melanin.
There was also a converse experiment: a population of dogs was un-domesticated by breeding for a strong wild response. I don't have the exact reference, but recollect that the process also took a remarkably low number of generations.<p>I wonder what sort of physical attributes/neurochemistry would develop in increasingly wild populations of dogs.
I remember reading an article about this in The Economist a few years ago.<p>The article stated that the tame fox specimen exhibited facial features that were slightly different from those of wild foxes, and that the tamer they were, the greater the differences were. Their jaws had become thinner, their chins less pronouned, and their eyes larger. The article noted that it was possible that these facial features were correlated with hormonal levels that made the foxes less aggressive and more tame, and that the same could be true in human beings.<p>Since human beings considers these facial features "attractive" in other human beings, it was possible to conclude that we're hardwired to be physically attracted to people whose facial features indicate a lower propensity to anger and aggression.<p>I've looked for the article on google but I can't find it unfortunately.
One of the first Americans to successfully import domestic foxes was video game artist, Kay Fedewa. There's a fascinating interview of her experience here: <a href="https://www.flayrah.com/3998/interview-kay-fedewa-domesticfoxcom" rel="nofollow">https://www.flayrah.com/3998/interview-kay-fedewa-domesticfo...</a>
Previous discussion:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517631" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517631</a>
was about Wikipedia article
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox</a>
There is an urban legend in Russia about these tamed foxes that quality of fur from them became a lot worse than from the wild ones, and thus all that attempt is considered a failure: foxes can be domesticated, but become useless as a result (originally it was done to reduce traumatism from bites on the fur farms)
"The domesticated foxes had floppier, drooping ears, which are found in other domestic animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, horses and goats."<p>I happened to recall the Origin of Species mentioning this: "Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears."
The hypothesis that (human) intelligence could very well be rooted in prosocial behavior seems interesting. Too bad they turned the control group into fur coats or they could have seen if the tame foxes are more intelligent than the non-tame ones c.p.<p>[ethically extremely questionable research imo]
A more accurate title would be "A Soviet Scientist Created Domesticated Foxes". Taming refers to making an animal accept humans by training, which is a fairly common practise. What this scientist did was to create a domestic breed by artificial selection.
There was also a great radiolab podcast a few years back on the same subject.<p><a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/</a>
I saw this covered first in the BBC documentary: The Secret Life of the Dog [1]. If you can find a copy online then it's definitely worth watching; super interesting.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pssgh" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pssgh</a>
Here's a video about this:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jFGNQScRNY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jFGNQScRNY</a>
The colour change is pretty interesting - it an nice example of genes for colours hitchhiking with the behavioral genes, that the foxes were selected for.