How to tame a fox
"Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs-they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken-imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time in order to witness the process of domestication. This is the extraordinary, untold story of this remarkable undertaking. Most accounts of the natural evolution of wolves place it over a span of about 15,000 years, but within a decade, Belyaev and Trut’s fox breeding experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes with floppy ears, piebald spots, and curly tails. Along with these physical changes came genetic and behavioral changes, as well. The foxes were bred using selection criteria for tameness, and with each generation, they became increasingly interested in human companionship. Trut has been there the whole time, and has been the lead scientist on this work since Belyaev's death in 1985, and with Lee Dugatkin, biologist and science writer, she tells the story of the adventure, science, politics, and love behind it all.
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What Hacker News says
- Highly recommend the book "How to tame a fox" about the Russian fur farm fox domestication experiment
- My top reads this year:
- How to Tame a Fox - great popsci history of a genetics experiment
- "The Sixth Extinction" and "Not the end of the world" - compelling but contrasting takes on climate change
- Through Two Doors at Once - posci history of the double slit experiment
- Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist - Luis Alvarez should get just as much attention as Feynman does IMO!
- A Matter of Death and Life - the last book I read this year that was touching and made me remember what’s really important in life
- There is a fascinating story documented in "How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution" by by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut (https://www.amazon.com/How-Tame-Fox-Build-Dog/dp/022644418X) about a long-running domestication of silver foxes, started in USSR in 1950ies and still running. One of the early comments in that book is what Dmitri Belyaev (idea man) really wanted was to run this on chimpanzees, but (paraphrasing his words) "a) due to breeding cycles the minimum time to results 6 centuries" and "b) the ethics of doing this would not pass any committee". He chose foxes since they breed once a year and he was able to justify it on commercial grounds (fur production). Results are absolutely spectacular, as the book lovingly documents
