GUNS, GERMS, STEEL AND WILL:

-ESSAY: Early Canid Domestication: The Farm Fox Experiment (Lyudmila N. Trut, Ph.D., March-April 1999, American Scientist)

Belyaev began his experiment in 1959, a time when Soviet genetics was starting to recover from the anti-Darwinian ideology of Trofim Lysenko. Belyaev's own career had suffered. In 1948, his commitment to orthodox genetics had cost him his job as head of the Department of Fur Animal Breeding at the Central Research Laboratory of Fur Breeding in Moscow. During the 1950s he continued to conduct genetic research under the guise of studying animal physiology. He moved to Novosibirsk, where he helped found the Siberian Department of the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences and became the director of the Department's Institute of Cytology and Genetics, a post he held from 1959 until his death in 1985. Under his leadership the institute became a center of basic and applied research in both classical genetics and modern molecular genetics. His own work included ground-breaking investigations of evolutionary change in animals under extreme conditions (including domestication) and of the evolutionary roles of factors such as stress, selection for behavioral traits and the environmental photoperiod, or duration of natural daylight. Animal domestication was his lifelong project, and fur bearers were his favorite subjects.

Early in the process of domestication, Belyaev noted, most domestic animals had undergone the same basic morphological and physiological changes. Their bodies changed in size and proportions, leading to the appearance of dwarf and giant breeds. The normal pattern of coat color that had evolved as camouflage in the wild altered as well. Many domesticated animals are piebald, completely lacking pigmentation in specific body areas. Hair turned wavy or curly, as it has done in Astrakhan sheep, poodles, domestic donkeys, horses, pigs, goats and even laboratory mice and guinea pigs. Some animals' hair also became longer (Angora type) or shorter (rex type).

Tails changed, too. Many breeds of dogs and pigs carry their tails curled up in a circle or semicircle. Some dogs, cats and sheep have short tails resulting from a decrease in the number of tail vertebrae. Ears became floppy. As Darwin noted in chapter 1 of On the Origin of Species, "not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears" - a feature not found in any wild animal except the elephant.

Another major evolutionary consequence of domestication is loss of the seasonal rhythm of reproduction. Most wild animals in middle latitudes are genetically programmed to mate once a year, during mating seasons cued by changes in daylight. Domestic animals at the same latitudes, however, now can mate and bear young more than once a year and in any season.

Belyaev believed that similarity in the patterns of these traits was the result of selection for amenability to domestication. Behavioral responses, he reasoned, are regulated by a fine balance between neurotransmitters and hormones at the level of the whole organism. The genes that control that balance occupy a high level in the hierarchical system of the genome. Even slight alterations in those regulatory genes can give rise to a wide network of changes in the developmental processes they govern. Thus, selecting animals for behavior may lead to other, far-reaching changes in the animals' development. Because mammals from widely different taxonomic groups share similar regulatory mechanisms for hormones and neurochemistry, it is reasonable to believe that selecting them for similar behavior - tameness - should alter those mechanisms, and the developmental pathways they govern, in similar ways.

For Belyaev's hypothesis to make evolutionary sense, two more things must be true. Variations in tamability must be determined at least partly by an animal's genes, and domestication must place that animal under strong selective pressure. We have looked into both questions. In the early 1960s our team studied the patterns and nature of tamability in populations of farm foxes. We cross-bred foxes of different behavior, cross-fostered newborns and even transplanted embryos between donor and host mothers known to react differently to human beings. Our studies showed that about 35 percent of the variations in the foxes' defense response to the experimenter are genetically determined. To get some idea of how powerful the selective pressures on those genes might have been, our group has domesticated other animals, including river otters (Lutra lutra) and gray rats (Rattus norvegicus) caught in the wild. Out of 50 otters caught during recent years, only eight of them (16 percent) showing weak defensive behavior made a genetic contribution to the next generation. Among the gray rats, only 14 percent of the wild-caught yielded offspring living to adulthood. If our numbers are typical, it is clear that domestication must place wild animals under extreme stress and severe selective pressure.

In his politically-correct but very silly book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond argues that those animals that Man domesticated were essentially pre-disposed to domestication and those that weren't domesticated were pre-disposed to non-domestication. The point of his argument, of course, is to justify the failure of many aboriginal cultures to domesticate many animals. Unless I'm misreading the implications of this study, which is entirely likely, it would appear to suggest, to the contrary, that if you subject a mammal population, even one that's not previously been domesticated, to sufficient selective pressure, you can domesticate them. It would seem particularly difficult for those who believe in Darwinism to deny this. How after all justify a belief that a natural process is so powerful that it can create everything from eyes to wings to the human brain, but that when human intelligence is brought to bear on a selection process you couldn't breed stubborness or orneriness out of an animal? Aren't you basically saying that a mere character trait is immutable? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 1, 2003 9:48 AM