Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
by James C. Scott · 21 Aug 2017 · 349pp · 86,224 words
of their wild cousins and progenitors, as well as by more contemporary experiments in domestication. The now famous Russian experiment in the taming of silver foxes is a striking example. By selecting the least aggressive (most tame) from among 130 silver foxes and breeding them to one another repeatedly, the experimenters produced, in only ten
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as to more than offset the losses through mortality. The reasons are not entirely clear, but domesticated animals generally reach reproductive age earlier, ovulate and conceive more frequently, and have longer reproductive lives. Tame silver foxes in the Russian experiment came into heat twice a year compared with once a year for undomesticated
Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis · 26 Mar 2019
individuals but also compared with related species that do not form such networks. Social niche construction would be adaptive. Domestic Bliss In the wild, the silver fox largely conforms to the cultural stereotype of foxes—elusive, cunning, even mean. In captivity, the creature is averse to human contact, and when it does cross paths
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with a human, it typically results in the human getting a firm bite. But the silver foxes at a farm outside of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Siberia yearn for human contact; they lick people’s faces, wag their tails
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a breeding experiment begun by the Soviet biologist Dmitry Belyayev in 1958. Using silver foxes, Belyayev—later joined by Lyudmila Trut (who is now the project’s supervisor)—reproduced and condensed millennia of canine domestication into a matter of decades. Domesticated animals are mainly distinguished from their wilder cousins by the ability to tolerate
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
by Richard Dawkins · 1 Jan 2004 · 734pp · 244,010 words
-yielding cows, and discard the calves of low-yielders. Some idea of the accidental genetic consequences of domestication is given by some interesting Russian work on silver foxes. D. K. Belyaev and his colleagues took captive silver foxes, Vulpes vulpes, and set out systematically to breed for tameness. They succeeded, dramatically. By mating together the
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word, dog, for domestic wolf, but not for domestic human. The genes of domestic animals have changed as a result of generations of contact with humanity, inadvertently following the same sort of course as the genes of the silver fox. The genes of (some) humans have changed as a result of generations of
Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman · 1 Jun 2020 · 578pp · 131,346 words
wanted to turn wild animals into pet material, simply by breeding only the most amiable individuals. For his test case, Dmitri chose the silver fox, an animal never domesticated and so viciously aggressive that the researchers could only handle them wearing elbow-length gloves two inches thick. Dmitri warned Lyudmila not to get
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. Dmitri Belyaev’s theory was that people are domesticated apes. That for tens of thousands of years, the nicest humans had the most kids. That the evolution of our species, in short, was predicated on ‘survival of the friendliest’. Dmitri Belyaev with his silver foxes, Novosibirsk, 1984. Dmitri died the following year, but
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continues to this day. Source: Alamy. If Dmitri was right, our own bodies should hold clues to prove this theory. Like pigs, rabbits, and now silver foxes, human beings should have got smaller and cuter. Dmitri had no way to test his hypothesis, but science has since advanced. When in 2014 an
The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
by Richard Wrangham · 29 Jan 2019 · 473pp · 130,141 words
been drawn to.8 In general, Belyaev was interested in the domestication syndrome, and in particular, in the breeding rate of captive silver foxes, a subspecies of red fox that had been brought over from Prince Edward Island, Canada, in the 1920s. Silver foxes produce an unusual fur color that is a Siberian and worldwide favorite
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of small rural farms all over the Siberian countryside had been keeping silver foxes for up to eighty fox generations. These foxes were certainly captive, but no deliberate attempts had been made to domesticate them. Indeed, unlike most genuinely domesticated animals, the foxes had not increased their breeding rate beyond the level in the
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wild: they still bred only once a year. This was disappointing for the farmers, but the slow breeding rate was not particularly surprising, given that the silver foxes were to a large extent simply
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, 35 percent; and by the thirtieth to thirty-fifth generations, 70 to 80 percent. Within a few years, the American Kennel Club applied to import domesticated silver foxes as pets.13 Impressive as the rate of change in tameness was, what really caught Belyaev’s attention was the appearance of other traits that
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“blaze” of white often found on horses, or similar white patches commonly seen on cows, dogs, cats, and many other domesticated animals. The star mutation had never before been described in silver foxes, but it soon appeared in forty-eight separate families of foxes at the experimental farm. These represented only a minority
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to decreased reactive aggression. A further critical test of our hypothesis is whether domesticated species show changes in genes that affect neural-crest migration. Since 2014, such effects have been found in six species (horses, rats, dogs, cats, silver foxes, and mink). Whether changes to neural-crest migration will be found in every
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animals. There were so many enthralling questions arising from Belyaev’s findings that even now, after more than half a century, few domesticated species have been studied in detail. Silver foxes, rats, and mink are the main objects of research in Belyaev’s former institute. Elsewhere, dogs, guinea pigs, mice, and chickens are
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this regard by retaining the white tail tuft (paedomorphically) until adulthood. Beyond anatomy, bonobo social behavior also remarkably fits the behavioral pattern Belyaev identified in domesticated silver foxes. In addition to reduced aggressiveness, there are two features of social behavior that are especially characteristic of domesticated animals: sex and play.29 Domesticated animals
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research into self-domestication proceeds, islands should prove particularly rewarding, because they seem likely to provide repeated opportunities to test the key inference stemming from Belyaev’s work. In my view, however, bonobos have already provided the crucial breakthrough. Bonobos support the simple prediction that comes from research on silver foxes: selection against
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skeletal features of domesticated animals, including the reduced maleness of their skulls, their short faces, and their smaller brains. In the case of foxes, the evidence of paedomorphic evolution is as clear as it is in dogs, because the process has been observed. Looking back over fifty years of the silver-fox study, Lyudmila
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hard to trust unfamiliar individuals. After the socialization window closes, even dogs can be difficult to train.14 Domestication extends the socialization window. Trut and her colleagues found that the fear response of silver foxes was delayed from 45 days in the unselected line to a full 120 days (four months) in the
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level is high in wild adults and low in wild juveniles and domesticates. The serotonin system conforms to the same picture. Serotonin, as discussed briefly earlier, is a neurotransmitter in the brain associated with the suppression of reactive aggression. In silver foxes, serotonin tends to be present at higher levels in juveniles than
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in adults and, as therefore expected, at higher levels in selected silver foxes than in the unselected lines.19 Retaining or exaggerating juvenile characteristics, both a muted fear response and reduced reactive aggressiveness, thus seems to be a
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investigators. Much remains to be discovered. However, juvenilization has already emerged as a major pathway for reducing emotional reactivity in silver foxes, dogs, and possibly all domesticates. The implication for the self-domestication hypothesis is straightforward. If Homo sapiens have been selected for reduced reactive aggression for the last 300,000 years, our species
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). 35. Kruska 1988; Trut et al. 1991 (article in Russian). Note that, because silver foxes have been kept in captivity in Siberia since they were imported from Canada in the 1920s, there was possibly some inadvertent selection for domestication before Belyaev’s experiment began in 1958 (Statham et al. 2011). No one has
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brains (Agnvall et al. 2015, 2017). 14. Buttner 2016. 15. Trut et al. 2009. 16. Paedomorphic effects vary among domesticated species. Whereas the levels of basal cortisol are much lower in silver foxes as a result of selection for low emotional reactivity, domesticated guinea pigs show no reduction in basal cortisol compared with
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. 2007. “The beautiful skull and Blumenbach’s errors.” British Medical Journal 335: 1308–9. Bidau, Claudio J. 2009. “Domestication through the centuries: Darwin’s ideas and Dmitry Belyaev’s long-term experiment in silver foxes.” Gayana 73: 55–72. Birdsell, Joseph B. 1953. “Some environmental and cultural factors influencing the structuring of Australian
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. Sacks, Anastasiya V. Kharlamova, Irina N. Oskina, Rimma G. Gulevich, Jennifer L. Johnson, et al. 2011. “On the origin of a domesticated species: Identifying the parent population of Russian silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes).” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 103: 168–75. Stearns, Jason K. 2011. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The
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domestication: The farm-fox experiment.” American Scientist 87: 160–69. ———, F. Ya Dzerzhinskii, and V. S. Nikol’skii. 1991. “Intracranial allometry and craniological changes during domestication of silver foxes.” Genetika 27 (9): 1605–11. (Article in Russian.) Trut, Lyudmila N., Irina Oskina, and Anastasiya Kharlamova. 2009. “Animal evolution during domestication: The domesticated fox
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher · 5 Sep 2022 · 439pp · 131,081 words
Fox and Build a Dog,” Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, American Scientist, July–August 2017. “The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment,” Lee Alan Dugatkin, Evolution: Education and Outreach 11, 2018. 31 “eager to establish human: “Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment,” Lyudmila Trut, American Scientist 87, no. 2, March–April 1999. 32 resolving
Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity
by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods · 13 Jul 2020
, E. A. Ostrander, J. S. Sinsheimer, “Structural Variants in Genes Associated with Human Williams-Beuren Syndrome Underlie Stereotypical Hypersociability in Domestic Dogs,” Science Advances 3 (2017). 16. L. A. Dugatkin, “The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment,” Evolution: Education and Outreach 11, 16 (2018), published online Epub2018/12/07, 10:1186/s12052-018-0090-x
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Psychology 10, e2001–e2001 (2019). 15. Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods, The Genius of Dogs (Oneworld Publications, 2013). 16. D. Belyaev, I. Plyusnina, L. Trut, “Domestication in the Silver Fox (Vulpes fulvus Desm): Changes in Physiological Boundaries of the Sensitive Period of Primary Socialization,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 13, 359–70 (1985). 17. Lyudmila
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
by Richard Dawkins · 21 Sep 2009
idea of how tameness, or anything else, can be sculpted – naturally or artificially – by looking at a fascinating experiment of modern times, on the domestication of Russian silver foxes for use in the fur trade. It is doubly interesting because of the lessons it teaches us, over and above what Darwin knew, about
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the domestication process, about the ‘side-effects’ of selective breeding, and about the resemblance, which Darwin well understood, between artificial and natural selection. The silver fox is just a colour variant, valued for its beautiful fur, of the familiar red
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky · 1 May 2017 · 1,261pp · 294,715 words
of rapid evolutionary change in species. And plenty exist. One example was wonderful research by the Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev, who in the 1950s domesticated Siberian silver foxes.65 He bred captive ones for their willingness to be in proximity to humans, and within thirty-five generations he’d generated tame foxes who
More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan · 6 Feb 2020 · 524pp · 155,947 words
a wild boar; sheep have brains 24% smaller than that of their wild ancestors.16 The process of domestication may have been remarkably swift. A Soviet scientist Dmitry Belyaev began an experiment with silver foxes in the 1950s. He selected the foxes that were the least aggressive towards humans and bred them. The
The Firm
by Duff McDonald · 1 Jun 2014 · 654pp · 120,154 words
. In the first election, international partners lined up behind Clee, who had spearheaded expansion outside the United States. Domestic partners, particularly those in New York, lined up behind Neuschel, known as the Silver Fox for his stylish gray hair. Smith, lacking a meaningful constituency, withdrew from the race and threw his weight against
Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World
by Joshua Paul Dale · 15 Dec 2023 · 209pp · 81,560 words
Village, in the Siberian wilderness, scientists breeding a unique population of foxes may have taken a significant step towards solving the mystery of the domestication syndrome. The Siberian silver fox experiment In folklore around the world, foxes are close to humans, yet also distant. They seem capable of being friendly, but never take
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Selection as a Factor in Domestication’, Journal of Heredity 70, 5 (1979), p. 301. 10 Claudio J. Bidau, ‘Domestication through the Centuries: Darwin’s Ideas and Dmitry Belyaev’s Long-Term Experiment in Silver Foxes’, Gayana 73 (Supplimento), (2009), p. 64. 11 Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 15. 12
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. 56. See also Trut et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication’, p. 3. 26 Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, pp. 57–8, 73. 27 Ibid., pp. 63–4. 28 Ibid., p. 72. 29 Ibid., p. 75. 30 Lee Alan Dugatkin, ‘The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment’, Evolution: Education and Outreach 11, 16 (2018
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responsible. A recent study found that fox chromosome 15 is a ‘hotspot’ for synaptic plasticity, which affects changes in learning and memory associated with domestication. See Dugatkin, ‘The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment’, p. 2. 35 Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, pp. 133, 154–5. See also Trut et al., ‘Animal
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domesticated animal species goes up to around forty if birds and fish are included. 13 Claudio J. Bidau, ‘Domestication through the Centuries: Darwin’s Ideas and Dmitry Belyaev’s Long-Term Experiment in Silver Foxes’, Gayana 73, Supplement 1 (2009), p. 62, dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0717-65382009000300006. The concept of unconscious
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: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Bidau, Claudio J., ‘Domestication through the Centuries: Darwin’s Ideas and Dmitry Belyaev’s Long-Term Experiment in Silver Foxes’, Gayana 73 (Supplimento) (2009). Black, Shirley Temple, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988). Bradshaw, John
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and Animal Domestication’, Nature 418 (8 August 2002), doi.org/10.1038/nature01019. Dictionary of the Japanese Language, 2nd edition, Vol. 2 (日本国語大辞典 第二版 第二巻), (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1972). Dreifus, Claudia, ‘Why bonobos don’t kill each other: a conversation with Brian Hare’, The New York Times (6 July 2010). Dugatkin, Lee Alan, ‘The Silver Fox Domestication
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see neotony neural crest and 1, 2, 3 pet-adoption theory 1, 2, 3 rubbish-dump theory 1, 2, 3, 4 self-domestication hypothesis 1, 2, 3, 4 Siberian silver fox experiment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 social imprinting and 1, 2, 3
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1, 2 burial, earliest fox-human 1 domestication syndrome and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 facial ‘expression’, cuteness of 1 people and, history of relationship 1, 2 Scroll of Frolicking Animals and 1, 2 Siberian silver fox experiment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
by Charles Murray · 28 Jan 2020 · 741pp · 199,502 words
can be changed rapidly through breeding. So can fundamental personality traits. A modern experimental example is the Siberian silver fox. In 1959, Soviet biologist Dmitry Belyaev decided to reproduce the evolution of wolves into domesticated dogs.33 Instead of using actual wolves, he obtained Siberian silver foxes from Soviet fur farms and began