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Belyayev's Fox Experiment

by deogeo on 1/25/20, 12:40 AM with 30 comments

  • by zone411 on 1/25/20, 3:33 AM

    A 2017 study showed that hypersocial dogs have structural changes in genes responsible for Williams-Beuren syndrome in humans. It speculates that this is what might have allowed domestication.

    https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700398

    https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/williams-syndrome

  • by fnwk on 1/25/20, 6:38 AM

    There has been some doubt about the validity of this experiment [1]:

    "A widespread misconception maintains that the Farm-Fox Experiment started with wild foxes and recapitulated the entire process of domestication. Belyaev himself accurately described the founders as fur-farm foxes, but by referring to the unselected population as ‘wild controls’, contributed to this misconception. In reality, the experiment started with a fox population from eastern Canada that had been captive and purpose-bred since the late 1800s, something Belyaev and his colleagues may have been initially unaware of."

    [1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.10.011

  • by rossdavidh on 1/25/20, 12:48 AM

    The woman who took over the experiment after Belyayev died wrote a book about if a few years back: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2116251372

  • by ronilan on 1/25/20, 1:43 AM

    This is a horribly edited Wikipedia article yet it is such a delight to read.

  • by mNovak on 1/25/20, 4:44 AM

    A handful of websites claim to offer pups from this specific colony as pets, which sounds wonderful. Though it's hard to validate they weren't just taken from a fur farm (thus not actually tame).

  • by oriettaxx on 1/25/20, 3:30 AM

    I was expecting much more content about the implications of these results on humans

    are we domesticated our-self? how does society (morals, e.g.) acts as Belyayev selection?

  • by walrus01 on 1/25/20, 1:29 AM

    Short documentary from a few years ago:

    https://youtu.be/4dwjS_eI-lQ

  • by superpermutat0r on 1/25/20, 10:39 AM

    The experiment is not designed well. I would guess that the tameness comes from the non stimulating environment more than the process of selection. It is known that mother imprints a lot of hormonal/stress activities to children while pregnant. Just like starving pregnant mothers have an effect on generations that come through hormonal gene activation similar thing happens to animals in wilderness. Is there a line of foxes bread for generations in captivity with purely random selection?

  • by mkl on 1/25/20, 6:06 AM

    We've discussed this a few times on HN, but old discussions are a bit hard to search for. Here are a couple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12493059

  • by sillysaurusx on 1/25/20, 3:04 AM

    An interesting aspect of this experiment often overlooked: the same process influences us.

    The way that we behave in a corporate setting seems closely related to domestication. It would be worth examining the traits associated with animal domestication and compare them to human behavior in a variety of contexts.

    It's not really a happy thought that we're domesticated, but power structures exist, and it's in most of our genetics to serve. It's often possible to trace certain types of ambition to a young age, for example. It would be neat to see a more rigorous exploration of whether it's true that humans are domesticated, and if so, how much, and what it means in a precise way.