3 ms·
same with russian fox fur breeders. i don't remember the numbers, but after a surprisingly small number of generations the foxes turned into cat-like pets.
by attila-lendvai 10mo ago
same with russian fox fur breeders. i don't remember the numbers, but after a surprisingly small number of generations the foxes turned into cat-like pets.
- pfdietz 10mo agoYes, that's a quite famous experiment, and still ongoing. Similar effects of "domestication syndrome" have recently been reported in wild urban foxes and raccoons.
- tokai 10mo agoRemember reading something about humans themselves show the signs of domestication syndrome.
- nkrisc 10mo agoNot in the literal sense (which would semantically impossible), but we have domesticated ourselves with the advent of farming and the domestication of crop plants. We fundamentally changed our own lifestyle into an agricultural one, the same we changed lifestyle of several large mammal species to co-exist with us in that agricultural lifestyle. So perhaps in some sense, maybe we actually did literally domesticated ourselves.
- antihipocrat 10mo agoWheat, barley and similar plant life have done pretty well for themselves, perhaps they domesticated us?
- lisper 10mo agoA chicken is an egg’s way of making more eggs.
- mjanx123 10mo agoThe markers of domestication in modern humans long predate the farming. 'Human' was the first animal available for domestication. There is a distinction between the domestication as set of changes in the organism and the 'applied' domestication in farming. In the applied sense, the humans on the top of the hierarchy do actually farm the humans below them.
- verisimi 10mo ago> Not in the literal sense (which would semantically impossible) Why is it impossible the humans are not domesticated? Are you making a point about language? I think this is certainly true. People in cities, where there are high amounts of people around act differently when they are in a small village or in nature with fewer or no people around.
- BurningFrog 10mo agoExecuting murderers will change the population over a few centuries.
- startupsfail 10mo agoYes, executioners do proliferate this way. They tend to run out of murderers quickly though, then use any other excuses to execute.
- Earw0rm 10mo agoOnly if they haven't yet reproduced.
- pfdietz 10mo agoI doubt it. The fraction of population that is murderers is quite small.
- BurningFrog 10mo agoIf so, you don't have to execute a lot of them to affect the murder rates!
- pfdietz 10mo agoThe question wasn't changing the murder rate now, but changing "the population over a few centuries". If it doesn't change the population genetics significantly it won't do that.
- BurningFrog 10mo agoIf 1% of men are potential murderers, and we execute 10% of them in each generation, it will have huge a impact on the murder rate over a few centuries, even though not a lot of people got executed, and the overall genetics of the population hasn't changed much.
- 10mo ago
- dyauspitr 10mo agoTails curled, ears drooped and they became mostly white.
- jojobas 10mo agoIt wasn't for fur, they ran a long-term selective breeding experiment just to see if they can pull it off.