The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment
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The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment How to Tame a Fox and Build a Dog∗ Lee Alan Dugatkin
For the last sixty years, a team of Russian geneticists have been running one of the most important biology experiments of the 20th, and now 21st, century. Each year they have selected the calmest foxes—foxes that are most prosocial to humans—to mimic the early stages of domestication. After providing an overview of how the silver fox domestication study began, I will discuss: 1) work on social cognition in the domesticated silver foxes, 2) work on the molecular genetics of domestication in the silver foxes, including work on changes in allele frequencies and changes in gene expression patterns, 3) a new hypothesis for how selection on tameness leads to the domestication syndrome via changes in the number and migration patterns of neural crest cells very early on in development, and 4) how the silver fox domestication experiment has led to new hypotheses about self-domestication in primates, including humans. Domesticated animals such as dogs, cats, cows, sheep, and so on, play an important role in human life. Ever since Darwin wrote his 1868 book, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication [1], evolutionary biologists and animal behaviorists have been fascinated with how, starting at least fifteen thousand years ago, and perhaps longer than that, our ancestors began domesticating animals. Fossil evidence can provide some clues about when and where the domestication has occurred, as well as some information on the stages of change in animals during domestication. But it can’t tell scientists how domestication got started in the first place. How had wild animals, averse to human contact, become calm enough for our ancestors to have started breeding ∗
Lee Alan Dugatkin is an evolutionary biologist and a historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is the author of nine books and more than 150 papers, in such journals as Nature, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, and is a contributing author to Scientific American, The American Scientist, The New Scientist, and The Washington Post.
Keywords Evolution, domestication, behavior, foxes, natural selection.
Vol.7, No.5, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-020-1014-y
RESONANCE | July 2020
987
GENERAL ARTICLE
them? To answer that question, the silver fox domestication experiment began in 1959 at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, and continues to this day [2, 3]. It is widely regarded as one of the more important long-term experiments ever conducted in biology. The work began under a Russian geneticist named Dmitri Belyaev (1917–1985). In the late 1930s, Belyaev was a student at the Ivanova Agricultural Academy in Moscow and in the 1940s, he worked as a researcher at the Institute for Fur Breeding Animals in the same city. From his reading of Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, and his work with d
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