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Apaper published yesterday (December 3) in Trends in Ecology and Evolution criticizes a famous experiment on fox taming and casts doubt on domestication syndrome, the idea that a variety of physical traits change when an animal goes from wild to tame.
In the 1950s, geneticist Dmitri Belyaev conducted a well-known animal domestication experiment at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, in which he tamed silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes) by selectively breeding the friendliest ones.
Within 10 generations, the foxes showed dog-like behaviors, such as seeking out human contact and licking people’s hands and faces. Their appearance also changed—they developed tails that curled up, spotted coats, and floppy ears similar in appearance to other domesticated animals such as dogs, cows, and pigs. This led Belyaev and other researchers to suggest that certain physical traits evolve with tameness, a phenomenon that came to be known as ...
