Dmitri Belyaev fled Moscow in Stalin’s Russia post-World War II when
Darwinian theories of evolution were prohibited. Hidden in Siberia, he
continued testing Darwinian ideas under the disguise of a fur farm.
While breeding foxes for the fur industry, he covertly began breeding a
population of foxes with the hopes of revealing the genetics of
domestication. He chose foxes for breeding based on a single
criterion. He only bred them if they fearlessly approached humans. To
his surprise, he stumbled onto the very cause of domestication. After a
few generations of breeding, his foxes began displaying many dog-like
characteristics. They developed floppy ears, spotted coats, curly tails –
they even wag their tails and bark even though he never selected for
any of these traits. This experimental domestication is viewed by many
biologists as the most important behavioral genetics work of the past
century.
We compared the experimentally domesticated foxes to a control line of
foxes that was not experimentally domesticated. We found that the
experimental foxes were as skilled at using human communicative gestures
as dogs while the control line performed more like chimpanzees and
wolves. Experimentally domesticating the foxes to be "nicer" made them
"smarter"!
source: http://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/research/dogs/research/domestication-of-social-cognition
photo: brian hare...
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