About 4 years ago I gave a talk at a genomics conference in Novosibirsk. I asked to go to this facility and it was super interesting. They were also doing similar experiments on minks and a few other mammals. I was pretty surprised on how few generations it took, and the physical features changed pretty drastically as well. I'll see if I can dig up some old videos.
That tamed mink is absolutely relaxed. Such an animal would likely serve as an excellent pet, but the regulatory and cultural obstacles are almost certainly insurmountable.
Even genetic evolution moves faster than our regulatory system!
Might be other problems though with a tame but undomesticated animal. Do they smell bad? Can they control their bladders etc? Carry pests or other undesirable bacteria etc?
Are feral dogs and cats not, though? I.e., we accept the risk of pet cats and dogs escaping into the wild and reproducing, and they are quite savage hunters when they need to be (cats, IIRC, even kill just for sport).
Not to the same extent, it seems - although probably that's because people have been drilled into neutering their pets for decades. Some places do have feral dog problems. The Scottish Wildcat is also threatened by interbreeding with domestic cats - an unusual form of extinction where it simply becomes indistinguishable as a species.
Thanks for these videos, they're real gems. I've wanted to see the foxes at the Institute for Cytology+Genetics for a very long time, and this raw footage almost puts me there. I finally see the difference between the tamed and not-so-tamed foxes - real eye-opener.
I must ask... do you happen to have any more footage hiding away? :) (The camera is in perfect focus, making this footage a rare treat for this type of thing)
Seeing the difference between the {non-,}tame mink was very interesting too, TIL.
"We always assume that intelligence is responsible for our success," says Hare. "That humans became smarter, which… allowed us to invent wheels and agriculture and iPhones. But what if that wasn't what happened?"
Hare suspects that, "like the foxes, and like dogs, we became friendlier first, and then got smarter by accident. This would mean that our prosocial skills, the skills that allow for cooperation and friendliness, were what made us successful."
A dog with the intelligence of a human still has the problem of having no fine manipulators (hands) with which to assist applying their intelligence on to the world around them.
While an opposable thumb is very useful, I don't think it's necessary for "practicing" intelligence. Cut a man's thumbs off and he'll be seriously impaired, but hardly so much that society couldn't develop tool use, agriculture and technology.
I feel opposable thumbs tend to be brought up on the logic of "this is one of many features unique to humans, therefore it must be related to the important feature unique to humans, which is intelligence". In this case it's not even unique to humans: all Old World monkeys and apes have opposable thumbs to one degree or another.
Whales have prehensile penises, so while it may seem a bit odd to us, they do have fine manipulators. (That said, in all seriousness I don't think a prehensile tail/trunk/penis would really be enough to develop tools the way we have.)
i have often wondered if something like the orca has reached basically the pinnacle of intelligence for an ocean-dwelling animal due to the restrictions of being in water.
I've often wondered if we had suitable computer-brain interfaces, could we harness octopus brains to process various computational workloads. Like a squishy co-processor
I'm not sure about computational, but their optics and the part of the brain that processes it is well used to low light conditions and navigating in space where there isn't just an X and Y axis, but also a Z axis.
Octopus are familiar with scuttling around on the seafloor and navigating around crazy terrain. Squid are used to using jet propulsion.
I've always thought that both species would be interesting to emulate in silicon for space exploration purposes.
Don't forget, human brains are squishy, too, and there are many more of them!
Sarcasm off
Not sure if your comment meant to be provocative, or if you just did not think through the ethical considerations of your statement. In fact, I am not sure how well protected octupus as a species are, since they lack a spine.
I was half joking, but I think there is something to be said for biological computation far beyond the capabilities of silicon, that we may be able to ultimately harness with better BCIs (brain-computer interface). Imagine Goldman Sachs running market predictions on huge banks of invertebrates hooked up to neural network HFT algorithms, literally earning the name "vampire squid" :)
However we readily eat squid and octopus, to the point of endangering them. We breed chicken and other animals in factories, in the case of battery hen from hatching to killing them in 72 weeks max (about 10% of their normal life span), in often horrific conditions.
Would using octopuses be more ethical than chimps, since they lack a spine and are genetically further from us? What if the octopuses were bred on a farm instead of captured in the wild? What if instead of whole animals, just the nervous system structures were grown in culture?
Thank you for your reply, and making your position understandable. In my humble opinion science has already a problem with communicating to the general public.
We are still far away from the comprehension of state, or even computuation in living tissue. The technology underlying silicium based computers is quite primitive compared to biologics. Certainly - these are interesting thoughts in theory - but for the sake of science communications with the general public I am very careful in what context and what way I would articulate these concepts.
Animal welfare, and the health of ecosystems, is definitely another minefield of a discussion.
I thought it's a known fact that people got smarter through social competition. That supports the assumption that people got smarter after they got friendlier, but that was by no means "by accident".
That's what I was thinking too. It seems to me that a certain intelligence might be a requirement for having good social skills, i.e. a good "theory of mind" of individuals around you. Therefore, it would make sense that social skills and intelligence must co-evolve. Total conjecture, of course.
However, octopuses are widely considered the smartest invertebrates, and they are solitary creatures. Hunting also exerts selection pressure for higher intelligence. You still need to predict the actions of other species even if you rarely interact with your own.
People got social by agreeing on a common enemy. To declare social biotope where social skills such as ally building, intrigues and "friendships" exist, the threat of such a common alienation must exist. The hatred and fear where there first.
I had a quick googlefu about this (note quick). The articles I found seemed speculative and nothing concrete to show Neanderthals were smarter. Mainly showing they were more similar to us in tools/clothes but nothing to indicate more advanced/smarter.
An almost unrelated anecdote, but I was touring Russia in a bus, and the old lady in front of us had lived in Leningrad in the 1930's. Her father was a dog-keeper for professor Ivan Pavlov.
The said father was an "enemy of the people" (Article 58) due to his ethnicity, so he was allowed only second-rate jobs, but Pavlov and his dog research had enough standing even during the Purges to protect the dog-keeper. The daughter then survived Siege of Leningrad and later escaped to Finland, ending up in the bus with us to tour the old places and tell her remarkable story.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by being an "'enemy of the people' due to his ethnicity"? I've studied a fair bit of Soviet law and never heard of someone being targeted for their ethnicity specifically.
In theory it was espionage or sabotage, in practice it was mostly ethnicity, i.e. person with wrong background at a wrong time in the wrong place. The bad luck of being in sight when someone had to meet his efficiency target in the process of purging any political opposition.
In this particular case, ethnic Ingrian near Leningrad. (Ingrians were the Finnish-speaking population in Leningrad oblast, i.e. people who had stayed there since Sweden ceded the area to Russia in the Treaty of Nystad ending the Great Northern War in 1721, and Peter the Great started to build St. Petersburg.)
Speaks a language other than Russian, confesses a minority religion, could quite easily be a spy and get information and then slip across the border. No real evidence was needed to put people in camps, kill them, or declare them enemies of the people. Stalin's repression killed hundreds of thousands in extermination camps where, by the way, Nazi officials visited to learn the trade of killing by hunger.
Today, the ethnic cleansing of Ingrians is all but complete; it was finalized by Finland allowing the Finnish-speaking population to immigrate in 1990s, leaving only some old people who are all soon dead.
To clarify, of course also ordinary Russians were thrown into this machinery of destruction. Another ethnicity just increased the likelihood quite a lot. Stalin himself was Georgian, not Russian.
The joking advice given to people eaten up by this machinery of killing was:
1. Do not confess anything.
2. If you confess, do not sign anything.
3. If you confess and sign, do not be surprised.
Of course, in reality, upon entering the system you were most likely dead already.
I presume you speak Russian then? If so did you learn anything about the quotation? I Googled it just now and found... this page.
The best jokes defy explanation to some degree. A good example: the de facto definition of 'chutzpah' is, "To kill your parents and then ask the judge for clemency because you're an orphan." Not only is it funny, it's also the best available definition.
I'm familiar with this, my family has some Ingrian ancestry, part of Estonia that is now Leningrad oblast. When Estonia became part of USSR before the WWII, land owners were "relocated" to Siberia, remaining population either fled to Finland or changed their names to disguise themselves as russians.
Another historical anecdote: When the Soviet-minded (i.e. repressive) Estonian SSR party head Karl Vaino was replaced by more liberal Vaino Väljas in 1988, people came up with signs something like "Elagu Vaino Väljas!"
This had two meanings: ostensibly "Hurrah Vaino Väljas!", but also "Hurrah, (Karl) Vaino is out!"
(Vaino is a name that can be either a first or last name in Estonian, but in Finnish it means "persecution". Karl Vaino's grandson Anton Vaino was recently nominated the Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office of Russia.)
Studying Soviet law outside the context of how it was "applied" in practice is very likely to lead to misunderstandings.
There's an saying from the time "Был бы человек, а статья найдётся" (lit. "If we have the man, we'll find the law paragraph [necessary for a conviction]" attributed to either Beria or Stalin, but considered illustrative of the applied law.
I don't know the answer, but there was an antisemitic campaign after the war (eg 52' Night of the Murdered Poets, campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" etc).
Shostakovich Symphony No.13 (Babi Yar) and the poem there used, Yevtushenko's Babiyy Yar was a protest of both soviet antisemitism and the government's refusal to recognise the site as a holocaust location (Jewish identity of the victims being denied; they were generalized as Soviet instead), even in the early 60s.
Also, and perversely ironically, the death of Stalin had a twist where a lot of the Jewish medical doctors had been implicated in a plot and therefore weren't readily available when Stalin fell ill. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot
A lot of people were targeted specifically for their ethnicity. Germans, Tatars, Chechens, Jews to name few examples (Jews not so officially, but there were unspoken bans for Jews in universities, for example). Family of my grandmother was deported from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, because they were Germans. These repressions were caused by World War II and are the reason why Germany now has a repatriation program for Jews and Germans from ex-USSR.
The deep and continual paranoid suspicion of difference and of everything is well covered in a great book by Simon Sebag Montefiore called "Stalin: Court of the Red Czar". Actually, anything by Montefiore is great - His book on Jerusalem is particularly excellent.
i believe there were two different concepts. the first one — an enemy of the state, or enemy of the people (враг народа) — is not about ethnicity. it's about "criminals" who deed horrible things to Soviet state and Soviet people.
some of these people were indeed criminals (although someone could argue that their crimes are usually not so horrible, i.e. banal theft), some of them — a lot, I think — were innocent.
enemy of the state/people was a working concept in 1930-1950s.
the second concept is about ethnicity. i don't know is there a name for it though. all of the ethnicities in Soviet Russia were declared equal, USSR was extremely anti-racist and anti-nationalist.
at the same time there were some nuances. for example, it was very hard to go to the top university if you are a jew (or jewish? I don't want to cause offence here). no one will tell you that you are not qualified because you are jewish, but you won't be there anyway.
there were two reasons behind that. the first one: it was too dangerous to give a good education to someone who could leave USSR for Israel later. the second one is quite obvious, i think.
I don't know when it began but it was relatively difficult for jewish kids to get to the top faculties of top universities even in 1980s. the same could be said about top-secret research and some other areas.
> all of the ethnicities in Soviet Russia were declared equal
Declarations and actual policy were very different things
in USSR (should I tell anything about Constitution of 1936?).
There were very brutal deportations of some Caucasian nations, of Germans, of Crimean Tatars based solely on ethnicity in 1940s. Many people died from cold and hunger, many children lost their parents. The forced labor (Labor Army) and movement restrictions were in place until mid-1950s and even children upon reaching age of 16 were required to report to local authorities as "special settlers" (I have archive documents from NKVD of such reports for my family). The practice of oppression was in place until end of 1980s: for example, Crimean Tatars were not allowed to return to their homes and were able to do so only in 1990s. Restoration of Autonomous Volga German Republic or creation of German autonomy within USSR in any other form was never allowed despite public demands.
These historical events are well-documented and recognized by government of Russian Federation, which rehabilitated the victims and in 1990s even paid small compensations (in form of increased pension) for these crimes.
I would call this "the risk of divided loyalties". If you spoke a foreign language, if you had relatives abroad, if you had been born abroad, if you had a distinct ethnicity, if you had a religion, if you had neighbours or friends who had anything of the above.
Any of these would make someone think that you might be disloyal to the Soviet state and loyal to something else, and therefore increase your likelihood of being arbitrarily picked up for espionage, treason or sabotage charges. And once picked up, the guilty one had been arrested, because the system does not make mistakes. At this point, it's only the crime that needs to be found.
(It is attributed to Stalin that he said "there are no innocent people, only people who haven't been properly investigated yet." Not sure if he actually said this anywhere.)
The risk of Jewish people having shared loyalties to Israel is mostly a post-1948 thing of course so it was in a different form during the Great Purges.
Fwiw this used to be a major concept in American political discourse as well, regarding both Jews and Catholics, although it typically didn't extend to actually arresting people, just keeping them out of political positions, and "sensitive" employment like schoolteacher. There was a widespread opinion that they had "divided loyalties" because while they were Americans, they also might feel loyalty to (depending on who you asked) foreign leaders or movements like the Pope or "International Jewry". The first serious Catholic candidate for U.S. president (Al Smith in 1928) was widely accused of being unfit to be U.S. president because his religion meant that he had a religious obligation to follow the infallible guidance of the Pope, a foreign head of state.
All were declared equal, but the General Secretary was declared more equal.
However, that's not the real problem. A society cannot work without some economic and social inequality.
Taking large numbers of people in the early morning hours from their homes, imprisoning and starving and shooting them in the back of the head and burying them in a ditch, that is a problem, and the system that did this survived until 1980's, and now Russia is increasingly nostalgic about it.
I feel gratified that you mentioned this. Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" obsesses about apartments. I suppose this is because financial opportunities were otherwise constrained. In this story at least cheating seems to have been the norm.
When I was at JCVI we tried to negotiate a plan to do a full genome sequencing of these foxes.
One of the more interesting discoveries - random piebaldness in animals (holsteins, pintos, salt and pepper dogs & cats) is almost exclusively found in domesticated animals and is probably related to genetic shifts in the expression of enzymes used to make dopamine, which is also the chemical precursor for melanin.
There was also a converse experiment: a population of dogs was un-domesticated by breeding for a strong wild response. I don't have the exact reference, but recollect that the process also took a remarkably low number of generations.
I wonder what sort of physical attributes/neurochemistry would develop in increasingly wild populations of dogs.
Australian Dingos maybe used to be (semi-)domesticated before they were introduced to Australia, originally having been bred in China, then gone 'wild' between 5000 and 18,000 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo#Origin_and_genetic_statu...). There is some research into the genome on that page, but AFAIK there is no whole genome assembly yet. You can tame those but wild dingoes are very dangerous animals, as many Australian tourists can tell you.
Zebras, on the other hand, are generally thought to be very hard to domesticate, with only a few successes of taming in the last hundred years, and zero success for domestication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra#Domestication
This could have relevance to dog breeds originally selected for fighting or baiting, then subsequently selected for companionship. Maybe if a fighting or baiting dog is n generations into social breeding it can be considered safe?
Dogs are kind of a weird case, from an animal population standpoint. On one hand, there are a ton of 'purebred' populations that undergo very specific selection and which are fairly genetically isolated from the rest of the species. These are your fighting dogs, your hunting dogs, your ratters, your herders, your companions, etc etc. On the other, there's this huge pool of castoffs and mutts, which aren't really undergoing any concerted deliberate selection at all. However, the castoffs from the specific breed dogs are constantly being shunted into the general population.
So to answer your question in that context: Yes, it would be more than possible to take a population of dangerous fighting dogs and use them as the base stock for a pet breed, provided that the breeding program was well designed. However, the general mutt population will always have fighting dog traits mixed into it so long as there are fighting breeds around.
I remember reading an article about this in The Economist a few years ago.
The article stated that the tame fox specimen exhibited facial features that were slightly different from those of wild foxes, and that the tamer they were, the greater the differences were. Their jaws had become thinner, their chins less pronouned, and their eyes larger. The article noted that it was possible that these facial features were correlated with hormonal levels that made the foxes less aggressive and more tame, and that the same could be true in human beings.
Since human beings considers these facial features "attractive" in other human beings, it was possible to conclude that we're hardwired to be physically attracted to people whose facial features indicate a lower propensity to anger and aggression.
I've looked for the article on google but I can't find it unfortunately.
> Their jaws had become thinner, their chins less pronouned, and their eyes larger. The article noted that it was possible that these facial features were correlated with hormonal levels that made the foxes less aggressive and more tame,
This is probably neoteny, which is considered a key part of the domestication of dogs.
> Some common neotenous physical traits in domesticated animals (mainly dogs, pigs, ferrets, cats, and even foxes) include: floppy ears, changes in reproductive cycle, curly tails, piebald coloration, fewer or shortened vertebra, large eyes, rounded forehead, large ears, and shortened muzzle.
For humans, neoteny is generally considered attractive in women.
Instead of remembering/finding that article perhaps you should just read the posted article which mentions the same things about "cuter" facial features.
Right, the process never really claimed to "tame" foxes. It is an experiment in selective breeding. Which as a goal aims to end up with domesticated foxes.
Selective breeding does mean that you take undesirables out of the gene pool, in this case, turning them into fur to be sold which further funds the experiment.
Maybe in 10 or 20 years when this is further along I would be interested in seeing how a Fox would do as a pet.
They make terrible pets because foxes mark their territory with a scent that is extremely pungent. You basically have to have enough land to keep them penned away from the home.
Perhaps, but it wasn't mentioned in the article. I'd consider those kinds of secondary things that breeders would work for once the primary goal has been accomplished.
This project has been going on for decades. If smell is a serious issue with foxes, someone certainly brought that up and increasing the scope in this way is rather obvious. In fact it's not really increasing the scope much at all because if you're going for pets, clearly the smell issue needs to be solved.
The primary goal of showing that this can be done at all, apparently has also been accomplished apparently decades ago. I can't imagine that they're not already in the refinement stage.
I did see that part. However it's still being an 'early adopter'.
10 or 20 years later the risk you take has been dampened because people have had Fox pets for complete life-cycles which means more of the caveats of ownership are known. And the breeding location has had even more time to breed out undesirable behavior.
A win-win of sorts as a consumer. Of course with the caveat being that the place could go out of business because of a lack of buyers.
You did mention that they are Reportedly pretty good pets, do you have a source on that? I would enjoy reading more on the subject.
>If the cubs continued to show aggressive or evasive responses, even after significant human contact, they were discarded from the population – meaning they were made into fur coats.
That might be very true, but then the information content of the word 'natural' drops mostly to zero.
Since languages tend to drop words when that happens, we would need to find another word that conveys what natural means today -- at which point, why not just use the word as it is?
The word "natural" is a misnomer. For example you can buy "natural" fruit, despite the fact that a farmer planted and raised the plant, a chemist invented the chemicals used for pesticide, and a truck brought them to your farmers market. And of course all these things arose from natural systems being modified by us homo sapiens. Perhaps it's better to refer to things as person-made (or man-made if you must), to avoid the ambiguity of the word natural.
That's how any economical selective-breeding programme is going to work. You gotta do something with the individuals not chosen to breed. Selling them for fur or food (or both), depending on what the market will bear is a rational solution.
The cruelty of this is mind boggling. The fact that they kept the animals in small cages for most of their lives, and expected tame behavior, is also shocking to me.
it still going on. Beside all these intelligent pigs and cows, just recently met a dog here in Palo Alto, a Beagle, who was rescued after doing time as a laboratory test subject - her vocal cords were removed so that her bark wouldn't inconvenience the lab employees, her health did took a hit from the lab time and diagnosing her issues and pains with her not being able to voice it makes it much harder. That deep sadness in her eyes...
While it doesn't make easy all that torture and suffering we, humans, imposed upon animals back then the reasons for what happened in the past are kind of understandable in the sense that we just didn't know it better. Today we do know, and thus there is absolutely no excuses, nor for animal testing, nor for pork&beef production (to start with), and the minuscule amount of money being invested in producing artificial meat is just a shame.
It should be noted that Lysenkoism was a Soviet state doctrine. In Belyaev's heyday, he had to dodge legitimate genetics research and make his work appear to be the study of animal psychology.
That doesn't seem to be case from the article. It seems like they were not selected from the first generation of foxes to be domesticated, and for each subsequent generations, the non-friendly ones were simply sold as fox pelts.
There is an urban legend in Russia about these tamed foxes that quality of fur from them became a lot worse than from the wild ones, and thus all that attempt is considered a failure: foxes can be domesticated, but become useless as a result (originally it was done to reduce traumatism from bites on the fur farms)
I've heard that was just the cover story, and the article seems to agree:
> The study of genetics had been essentially banned in the USSR, as the country's dictator Joseph Stalin sought to discredit the genetic principles set out by Gregor Mendel. Stalin's death in 1953 gave scientists more freedom, but in the early years Belyaev nevertheless worked under the cover that he was breeding foxes to make better fur coats.
The hypothesis that (human) intelligence could very well be rooted in prosocial behavior seems interesting. Too bad they turned the control group into fur coats or they could have seen if the tame foxes are more intelligent than the non-tame ones c.p.
A more accurate title would be "A Soviet Scientist Created Domesticated Foxes". Taming refers to making an animal accept humans by training, which is a fairly common practise. What this scientist did was to create a domestic breed by artificial selection.
I saw this covered first in the BBC documentary: The Secret Life of the Dog [1]. If you can find a copy online then it's definitely worth watching; super interesting.
The colour change is pretty interesting - it an nice example of genes for colours hitchhiking with the behavioral genes, that the foxes were selected for.
