Skip to main content

How to Tame a Fox (and build a dog) - Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut ****

One of Rudyard Kipling’s just so stories tells us about early humans domesticating animals and how the 'The Wild Dog' became the 'First Friend'. Kipling was right: archaeology and genetics evidence tell us that dogs were the first animals to be domesticated. They descend from wolves that lived about 23,000 years ago. Today, there are so many different looking dogs — Poodles, Bulldogs, Afghan Hounds… — that it is pretty astonishing that they all originated from wild wolves. 

As with other things that happened a long time ago, we can just imagine how this happened (like Kipling did) and scientists can infer it from the data they gather. But ultimately, we have no way of knowing the exact story of what happened. Still, some lines of research may help with this. One particular long-term experiment, started in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule, selecting tame(r) silver foxes throughout generations, has provided plenty of insights on how domestication can happen and how dogs may have become our best friend. The story of this research, the researchers and their foxes is told in How to Tame a Fox (and build a dog).

The book starts as Dmitry Belyaev, then the lead scientist of a governmental research program on fox breeding for fur, plans and starts his experiment to domesticate foxes by breeding less aggressive foxes throughout generations, attempting to re-create the domestication of dogs. This had to be done in utmost secrecy as, at the time, Soviet research in genetics was strictly forbidden. Belyaev knew only too well the consequences of opposing the ruling views on science since several of his colleagues had been imprisoned or had 'disappeared', like his own brother, also a scientist. A few years later, after the death of Stalin and as research in genetics became studied again, he established this research line and put Lyudmila Trut, then a recently graduated scientist, in charge of this research line in a fox farm at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Siberia. (The experiments continue to this day and Trut, now 89, is still the leader of this research.)

In an amazing illustration of the power of evolution happening through (artificial) selection, in a few generations, the foxes became tame, with curly tails, emitting sounds and following humans around — looking and acting almost like dogs. The book, written by an evolutionary biologist, Lee Alan Gugsatkin, and Lyudmila Trut herself, narrates decades of work as seen and felt by the scientists — their enthusiasm, resilience and sometimes despair. 

I find a couple of things slightly unsettling in this book. Although Trut is an author, she is always referred to in third person, which is odd and hard to reconcile with the omniscient author. There is an occasional lack of modesty ('Lyudmila had received the highest caliber of training' and was a 'top young student'), and, in the case of Belyaev, a cult of personality ('a striking handsome man, thick coal-black hair and penetrating dark brown eyes', his 'demanding standards of excellence were profoundly inspiring'). In addition, while animal welfare was definitely seen differently a few decades ago, we are left to wonder about the conditions in which these foxes lived and about their ultimate fate. In addition, the experiments have been criticized by current researchers pointing out that these foxes, farmed for fur, could not have been totally wild to begin with. However, this is still an amazing story.

When reading this book we follow the scientists in their quest while having in the background part of the history of the Soviet Union, making this book an interesting read for both those interested in natural sciences and for those interested in the history of science. I would guess Darwin would have liked to read about these experiments and its results — and perhaps so would Kipling.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Rita Ponce - See more of Rita's writing here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more