Inside My Brain During a 45 Minute Commute

whiskeyandgoatsmilk:

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: WHY SCIENCE AND MY INTEREST IN OWNING A FOX HAVE GIVEN ME A REASON TO KEEP ON LIVING.

“In the mid 1950s, a geneticist named Dmitri Belyaec found himself on the losing end of a scientific dispute and was fired from his position at Moscow’s Central Research Laboratory of Fur Breeding. Belyaev wound up as head of an animals research facility in Siberia where, in 1959, he began a remarkable experiment of silver foxes that went on for forty years and involved over 45.000 animals. It changed the way scientists think about domestication.

By selectively breeding foxes for tameness around humans, Belyaev sought to create a strain of captive foxes that would be easier to work with. At the fur farm, he tested fox kits for their reactions to people and their cross-bred the tamest males and females. Initially, only a few foxes met his strict friendliness-to-humans criteria. By the tenth generation, 20% of foxes were tame, and after the forty generations, 80% of fox kits were tame. The selectively bred foxes would lick your face; the unselected line of animals would rip it off. 

So foxes for tameness became nice. Big deal. Here is the important part: An unintended by-product of selection for tameness was that foxes began to look and act like dogs. Over the generations, their ears became floppy and their tails curly. Their coats began to show traces of brown (the probable color of early dogs), and some of them developed the white patches you sometimes see on the faces of dogs. The foxes faces became shorter, wider, cuter. The animals showed decidedly un-foxlike behaviors. They wagged their tails when people greeted them. The foxes’ physiology changed, too. Compared to normal foxes, their levels of the stress hormone cortisol were lower than their neurons that produced more of the brain’s natural antidepressants. No wonder they were mellow. 

Why should traits as different as coat color, they curl of the tail and the shape of the head be dragged along with having a nice personality? We don’t know, but behavior and color are genetically linked in species ranging from garter snakes to rats. Whether the changes that occurred in Belyaev’s tame foxes were produced by a small number of linked genes, or even a single gene, is unclear.”

-Hal Herzog - Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals.

DREAMS CAN COME TRUE

Fascinating stuff!