Rossdavidh's Reviews > How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution

The entire list of all the experiments that science has ever performed, if it were ever made, would be...large. But, if we limit it to only those experiments which get written about in a book (textbook or popular science or other), it would still be fairly long. If we ranked them by how often they get mentioned, then the ones at the top would probably be things like Milgram's mock electrocutions, Pavlov's ringing of bells to make dogs salivate, and the Michelson-Morley experiment that showed there is no ether. Then, there would be the experiment which is the subject of this book.

While it may not be top of the list, the breeding of domesticated foxes in Siberia is pretty close. Conceived of and begun by Dmitri Belyaev, the experiment has been going since the 1950's, and it makes for both great science and great reading.

The villain of the story is a fellow named Lysenko, who was not a great scientist, but had the excellent advantage (in the early Soviet Union) of coming from a peasant background. He did not believe in the genetic theories of Gregor Mendel, and would later say that DNA did not exist. He believed that traits we acquire could be passed on to the next generation, in a manner rather similar to Lamarck. He rose to high prominence under Stalin, and for a time made experiments such as the one Belraev wished to conduct, hazardous.

Because what Belraev wished to do, was to use artificial selection to create a tame fox. The core science that motivated him to do this, was the very ideas of genetics and evolution by selection that Lysenko denounced. By selecting in each generation for the foxes which were least averse to human presence (or, in later generations, the most eager for it), he hoped to recreate something like the process which resulted in wolves becoming dogs over 20,000 years ago.

It was a daring experiment for many reasons, not all of them political. There are numerous cases of humans trying, and failing repeatedly, to domesticate species. For example, the zebra. By committing to years of work on selecting for domestication in foxes, Belraev was gambling that the potential for it existed. If, like zebras, there just wasn't any domesticatability there to select for, then it could be years spent for no gain.

One of the co-authors of the book, Lyudmila Trut, was another scientist who joined on the project from an early stage, and as Belraev outlasted Lysenko (and the "Lysenkoists" who followed his ideas) and began to move up the ladder of Soviet science, she eventually became the person who continued to run the experiment.

The results are still coming in, over 60 years later, but some results already achieved are:
1) it is possible to breed foxes to be easy to interact with, in as few as 8 generations, by simply selecting based on the degree of aversion
2) it is also possible to breed foxes who are especially negative towards humans, who will bristle with rage at our approach
3) the friendly, domesticated foxes end up acquiring a lot of other traits, some of them physical and some of them behavioral, that were not selected for. The mechanism for becoming friendlier seems to have cascading effects.
4) among these other affects appears to be an increased ability to have sex, and puppies, more than once a year
5) many physical attributes become slightly more dog-like as the generations of selection go by, including slightly floppy ears and splotchy coloring

More recent advances have resulted from the ability to do relatively cheap DNA sequencing, and the comparison of domesticated fox DNA to their wild-type cousins sheds light on the process of domestication. At least some of the genetic changes to appear to parallel those in the wolf -> dog evolution, although there is still a lot of details to be worked out there. This is still very much a current science experiment, producing new results.

The book does not read like a science journal, though, as the very human aspects of working with the animals is an important part of the science. As the foxes become friendlier, they also become increasingly hard to resist. Given the speed with which they became domesticated, which was probably faster than the analogous process from wolf to dog, one has to wonder whether or not it was changes in human friendliness that was the limiting factor. Whatever generation of caveman (or cavewoman) who first decided to start feeding food scraps to the friendliest (or least unfriendly) of the wolves, could conceivably have seen the results of this within their own lifetimes.

Belraev also, although he is dead now, lived to see his ideas vindicated, and his experiment become of great interest not only within Russia but throughout the world. The Siberian silver fox experiment was not the only one to change our understanding of how rapid evolution could happen, but it was unquestionably one of the most important ones. Fifty years ago (or less) in the United States and elsewhere it was common to read in science textbooks that evolution could happen only slowly, over many thousands of years, for any change other than purely cosmetic, or in any animal more complex than an insect. We now know that it can happen orders of magnitude more quickly than that, fast enough that, if it were to happen (or have happened) in humans, it could produce dramatic changes in behavior in a couple centuries.

This books is a very good survey of the science, and the scientists, who carried out this experiment, and the very real obstacles they had to overcome over the course of more than half a century to keep it going. Plus, I have to say, the color glossy photographs of foxes and fox puppies, are awfully cute. I guess I'm just genetically predisposed to think that.