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Look easy, and lee does it incredibly well. And i, in a presentation i did yesterday, i said that one of the very best things about the profession of of being a writers that it introduces me to so many people who are very passionate about the work they do, and they became experts out of enthusiasm. And out of thinking that what they do is the most fascinateing thing in the whole world. Lee dugatkin is a prime example of that thesis. Lee and i met out here in this allegedly real world about two hours ago, but weve known each other for years. We met through our books, and weve communicated electronically for many years. So i want to mention that before i knew that lee is professor of biology at the university of louisville, i knew him as the author of mr. Jefferson and the giant moose which is a very vivid and detailed, wonderful book about Natural History early in the time of a country that, at that time, had a president who was very interested in facts. So lee has over the years written and coauthored many books including acclaimed textbooks that at moment are introducing the next generation of scientists to the topic such as animal behavior and the principles of evolution. And he has written a lot about the origins of altruism and cooperation, and he famously exemplifies and im not the only person who says this altruism and cooperation himself. Hes a Legendary Hospitality in the field, and ive experienced it myself. Today hes going to talk about his new book, which is how to tame a fox. Hes going to tell you the story. It is, as the New York Times said in the New York Times book review, part science, part russian fairy tale and part spy thriller. I know writers who would ransom their grandmother for the kind of reviews this book has been getting for the last year. One of the great intellectual and emotional experiences in my own life was the realization many years ago of what i get from this kind of book, books such as how to tame a fox. And it is the realization that now is with me all the time as a nonfiction writer. And just as a person, and thinking about it greatly improves rush hour traffic. It becomes part of my way of seeing the world. When you walk out of here, youre going to think differently about how nature works. And that realization that i get from this kind of book is that natures creative medium is the individual living generation. Which means that nature has never been more creative, service not in the jurassic era more than it is today. It also means that theres never been a member of the species homo sapiens who was more of the cutting revolution than you are. And four years ago i reproduced finally, so im now in the game. Thats another thing lee and i have in common. We both dote on sons who are of course, objectively, extraordinary people. So i want to mention that the fun thing of the kind of book like this is the crossreferencing that it sort of sets off in the brain as you begin to see the world differently. What it made me think of is a line in proost, and i think the second volume of in search of lost time. The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time. It occurs every day. Please welcome lee dugatkin. [applause] thank you so much. Ive really been looking forward to this and particularly so because i have the chance to be introduced by my favorite writer, michael sims. [laughter] so im going to start off in an unusual way, which is to ask you a question. Suppose that you could build the perfect dog. What would be the key ingredients in your recipe . Well, youd certainly want cute, maybe floppy ears, a curly tail that wags in anticipation whenever youre around, smart, loyal, intelligent. The thing is, you dont need to build this, because for the last six decades a dedicated team of russian geneticists in siberia have been building it for you. The perfect dog. Except its not a dog at all. Its a fox. Its a domesticated fox. They built it in the often minnesota 40 degree weathers 40 degree weather of siberia, a hundredth of the time it took our ancestors to nest candidate wolves into domesticate wolves into dogs. This is a picture of my friend and colleague, ludmilla, shes 83 years old and every day including today for the last 58 years, she has been leading whats companyknown as the silver fox domestication study. For the last seven years, ive had the honor of working with her to produce a popular book about this where we tell the science and we tell the behind the scenes stories. What im going to tell you about today are folks that will melt your heart and lick your ears just like this fox did five seconds after they put him in my arms in siberia. More than that, im going to tell you about the science thats been done thats made us rethink the process of domestication, a process thats critical to our own evolutionary history. So were going to try to walk through this 58year experiment in about 40 minutes. It all starts with this fellow, dmitri. In the late 1930s, he was a College Student at a place called the ivanova institute, and because it was an agricultural college, he had all sorts of interactions with many domesticated species. After he finished there, like almost every single russian male the time, he went and fought in world war ii. When he came back, belyaev landed a job at a place called the Central Research laboratory for furbreeding animals in moscow. And the two key animals were foxes and pinks. And thats because minkings. And thats because in the early 1950s fox fur and mink fur were some of the very few reliable sources of western money coming into the sow union. And it was while he was at the Central Research lab that he came up for the idea that would turn into the silver fox domestication study. And heres how it started. From his own reading and from his own interaction with domesticated species, belyaev knew that many domesticated species share a common set of traits. They tend to have things like floppy ears, curly tails, modeled muttlike fur patterns, low stress hormone level, they tend to reproduce longer than their wild ancestors. And belyaev thought this was interesting. He thought, why on earth should that be . Because if you think about it, weve domesticated species for all sorts of reasons. We domesticated some for transportation, like horses. We domesticated other species like pigs and cattle for food. And yet other species like dogs for companionship and protection. And yet many domesticated species share those traits, floppy ears and curly tails and low stress hormone levels. So much so that that suite of traits is known as the domestication syndrome, and belyaev said why should this exist . And his hypothesis went like this. All domestication events, belyaev hypothesized, began with our ancestors choosing the calmest, tamest animals. You cant have your domesticated species biting your heads off. So they all start by choosing for the calmest, tamest animals. And then belyaev further hypothesizes that all those other traits that i mentioned, somehow or another and he wasnt sure how somehow or another they must be genetically connected to tameness. And so he decides that hes going to test these ideas. Hes going to run a domestication experiment in realtime using foxes that he knows so well. And the experiment at one level is incredibly simple. What belyaev proposed to do was every generation choose the calmest foxes and breed them. And then he could test first whether or not he was getting tamer and tamer animals over the years and whether or not all those other traits like the floppy ears and the curly tails also began to appear in the foxes. Hes going to test it in realtime, but hes got a problem, and its a big problem. When he comes up with this idea in the late 1940s, early 1950s, hes coming up with an experiment in genetics, because all experiments in nest case are experiments in genetics. But at this time it was illegal to do genetics in the soviet union. And thats because of this fellow on your lefthand side. He was a charlatan, a pseudoscientist who had risen up in the ranks. Not just the political ranks, but the scientific ranks. And the way that he did this was by arguing that western genetics was abuse boy science that was being promulgated by [inaudible] and in fact, he argued, an idea that had long been disproven was, in fact, correct and more in line with soviet philosophy. Lysenko became so important that he literally was stalins righthand man when it came to science. Here hes giving a talk, a firespitting talk where hes calling western geneticists wreckers and saboteurs. After the talk stalin stands up and says, bah slow, comrade lysenko. Thousands of geneticists in the soviet union lost their job. Hundreds were thrown into prison. Dozens were actually murdered by his thugs. So this was the environment in which belyaev came up with his experiment, which is an experiment in genetics. He knew all too well how dangerous it was to do this, because one of those dozen to two dozen people that were murdered by lysenkos thugs was belyaevs older brother who was an up and coming geneticist. But he wasnt scared. He would be careful when he started this experiment on domesticating foxes, because he knew it would involve a lot of people, and he didnt want to put other people at risk. So he decides hes going to start. Now, at this time hes still working at that fur research institute, and so he doesnt have time and money to begin a fullblown experiment in the early 50s. He starts a little pilot experiment with a colleague in estonia. Every generation they work with a couple of dozen foxes, they choose the tamest ones, and they watch year after year foxes breed once a year year after year to see whether or not even with that small sample size, does it look like theyre getting a little tamer over the generations . And the answer was, yes. Belyaev got his big break in 1959. What had happened was he was offered a position as a vice director of a new giant institute of biology that was being built in siberia. It was part of a place thats known as the academic village. Basically what happened was khrushchev and some leading scientists of the day cleared out a large chunk of siberian forest, and they built two dozen world class institutes. Everything from biology to chemistry to physics to early computer science. And belyaev was going to be vice directer of the biology institute. So now hes going to have the power and the money to start a fullblown experiment. What hes not going to have is the time. Hes going to have tremendous administrative duties, and so what he needs to do is find a young scientist who could lead the fullblown silver fox domestication experiment. So what he does before he leaves moscow to start in siberia is he visits moscow state university. One of the finest universities in the world and also one of the most beautiful. He talks to some colleagues there, he tells them here is what i want to do. Every generation im going to select the calmest foxes, im going to do this nest cake experiment. Domestication experiment. One of the people that comes in is ludmilla. At this time hes 25 years old, and shes just finishing her undergraduate degree, belyaev interviews her, and she remembers it as if it happened yesterday. He looked at her and said, i want you to build a dog out of a fox. And he laid out the experiment. Every generation were going to select the calmest foxes, and were going to see do we get tamer and tamer animals. Do those other things associated with domestication pop up. And lyudmilas fascinated. By this time lysenko is not quite as powerful as he was before, but he could throw them in prison. She was really touched that belyaev made sure she understood this is a dangerous endeavor. And he also told her, you know, i think im on to something here. The little pilot experiment suggests this might work, but its an experiment in domestication. It could take 10 years, 20 years, it could take your whole life before you find something interesting. But she was hooked. She wanted to be involved in the experiment. So she takes her husband and their 2yearold daughter, and they take a train ride from moscow to siberia which is no easy train ride to begin the fullblown experiment. Now, shes going to work at this institute of biology that belyaev is a part of, but theres still not a place there where they can run an experiment with the silver foxes. Theres not an experimental fox farm yet. So what lyudmila has to do is travel around the soviet union and visit these fox farms that exist mostly for breeding foxes for their fur. And there are hundreds of these all owned by the government. And lyudmila samples them to find the right place to start the experiment. Eventually, she settles on a place which was about 225 miles south of where she was in the academic village. An overnight train ride. Four times a year lyudmila would go there. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, to start the experiment. This place, lesnoi, is a massive fox farm. At any given time there could be 10,000 foxes there. It was a cash cow for the government. And when lyudmila went there and said what she wanted to do, this domestication experiment, the director looked at her like she was crazy. Why would anyone want to waste their time when all this money exists in terms of fox fur. But they said, okay, fine, you can work with a couple hundred foxes. See what happens. So lyudmila starts the experiment. And the protocol is pretty basic. Every morning at 6 00 in the morning she gets up, and she starts, and she moves from fox cage to fox cage. Shes going to score the foxes on how tame they are. So she scores them as she approaches their cage. Are they tame, are they neutral, are they aggressive. She scores them as she stands by the closed cage, as she opens the tour to the cage, and she door to the cage, and she scores them as she places something inside the cage. And she does this for hundreds of foxes each year, once when its a pup, and once when its an adult. And she comes up with a composite score of how calm they are. And then what she does is she takes the top 10 of the calmest males and the top 10 of the calmest, tamest females, and she breeds them. Every generation. Now, at the start lyudmila describes these foxes as, essentially, firebreathing dragonnings. But there was dragons. But there was variation. Some of them were a little calmer, some of them were hyperaggressive. Even after a couple of years, she was beginning to see hints that the experiment might work. This is a fox known as laska. Even after a couple of generations of breeding, laska was calm enough that lyudmila could hold her in her arms. Every generation they got slightly calmer and tamer as a function of the breeding. So much so that about five years after the experiment began, lyudmila had to come up with a classification system for these foxes. So what she did was she had class iii foxes that never made the cut for breeding next generation. Even five generations after the experiment begins though, there are these class 2, foxes that allow her to pick them up, but they dont show motional response. And then there are these class i foxes. They allow lyudmila to pick them up, but they also display whining behavior when she leaves the way that your dogs do, and they tail wag when she approaches. These are the foxes that are making the cut for the next generation. A year later lyudmila has to come up with another category because the experiment is working so well. And heres how she describes them. Sixth generation of the experiment, pure pups eagerly sought contact, not only tail wagging, but whining, whimpering and licking our hands in a doglike manner. Whats more, they werent only wagging their tails, they were wagging their nowcurly tails. Okay . A few of the domesticated foxes had curly tails. Thats one of those traits that we see in lots of domesticated species. All of a sudden, it pops up in the foxes. Theyre never choosing the ap malls based on the animals based on whether they have a curly tail. The first of the traits in the domestication syndrome now pop up. Couple of years later belyaev secures the funds and the space to bring the experiment to the institute of biology. This is what the experimental fox farm looks like on a nice day in a siberian winter. There are about 50 foxes in each of these sheds, and now lyudmila and her team arent restricted to just working with the foxes four times a year when she sakes this long train takes this long train ride. She can work with them every day, and she does. Thats a plus. Belyaev can come and interact with the foxes now. Just as important, be Something Special if Something Special happens, she can pick up the phone or jump in the car and bring belyaev over to show him. And one of the special things that happened very quickly was this fox known as meshta. She was the first of the domesticated foxes to show floppy ears, another one of those traits that we see in domesticated species. Now were seeing it. And admittedly just a few of the tame foxes, but over time that would grow. Mechta looked so much like a dog that when belyaev used to take this slide, people would accuse him of throwing up the picture of a dog to convince them that the fox experiment was going well. Thats how much she looks like a dog. Now we not only have animals that are getting tamer and tamer and calmer and calmer every generation, but theyre now showing curly tails that they wag and floppy ears. Belyaev looked at mechta and said what kind of wonder is this . And thats what everyone who saw her said. As time went on, every generation animals were getting slightly calmer and tamer. And they were beginning to see all sorts of other things emerge. For example, by the mid 1970s they found that the pups of domesticated females opened their eyes a day earlier than normal foxes. They responded to sounds two days earlier. When lyudmila takes off her population geneticist hat and just talks freely, shell say its almost as if these foxes were itching to interact with humans early. Another thing that was happening was females were extending their breeding season. Domesticated foxes were breeding earlier than normal foxes and breeding a little later. Normally a week in late january or february, they were breeding a couple of days earlier and kept breeding a couple days later. Another classic thing that we see in domesticated species now appearing in the tame foxes. Strange color patterns were starting to emerge, these muttlike colors that i said we see in so many domesticated species including, bizarrely enough, a strange white star that often appeared on the foreheads of the domesticated foxes. If you know horses, you know that sometimes this odd thing happens in horses, one of our domesticated species. And on and on and on. So at this point, lyudmila and dmitri decide theyre going to expand the experiment. Every generation theyve been selecting the calmest, tamest animal, now theyre going to add another experimental line. And what theyre going to do is theyre now, in this line, going to choose the least tame, least aggressive least calm animals. They are going to choose the foxes that are most aggressive towards humans. Not so much because theyre interested in aggression, but because having line of aggressive foxes is going to allow them to better understand their tame foxes. For example, in genetics if you do breeding crosses between aggressive and tame foxes, you can understand something about the underlying genetics. But more importantly for us, what this line of aggressive foxes does is it allows lyudmila and belyaev to address a question that is always sort of sitting there under the surface when youre doing these kind of experiments in genetics. This is an experiment in genetics. Youre always worried about something. You think that the changes that youre seeing are due to underlying genetic changes that occur because youre breeding certain types. But youre always worried that Something Else might be causing the changes youre seeing. Maybe pups learn by interacting with their moms, and thats why some of them are more tame and others more aggressive. Maybe theres something about the hormonal cocktail that you experience in your moms womb as you develop so that when youre born, you act one way or another. Theres all sorts of other kind of nongenetic things that might be explaining whats going on, and you can never know that until you run an experiment. And the classic way to do this is to run whats known as a transplant experiment. And so lyudmila does this. And basically, heres the set up. It involved pairs of female foxes. One of the pair is a tame fox and one is an aggressive fox. Theyre pregnant. Theyre about a week pregnant, okay . And there are many of these pairs. And what lyudmila does is she learns the intricate surgery thats necessary, and what she does is she transplants half of the developing embryos from the aggressive fox into the tame foxs uterus and half of the tame folks developing embryos into the uterus of the aggressive fox. So now each of these foxes is holding their own developing biological offspring plus foster offspring. Now, this is critical because this allows you the power to know is what youre seeing due to yes e nettic change. Because you can look at the pups when theyre born. If the pups behave like their genetic mom even when theyre raised in the uterus of the opposite kind of female, then that tells you their behavior is due to underlying genetics. So you look at the behavior of the foster pups to see do they act like their foster mom, or do they act like their biological mom. If they act like their biological mom, the changes youre seeing are due to genetics. So she does this with dozens of pairs, and let me just show you the first problem that she had, which was this. Yeah, she can go in and she can transfer oneweekold embryos from one fox to the other. But when they give birth, how the hell is she going to know which one are the foster offspring and which one are the biological . Fortunately, the foxes themselves present the answer because coat corps ration is genetic in coloration is genetic in foxes. So she knows whos who. And let me just show you one example of what lyudmila found, and this was typical. Heres her description of a clutch of pups born to an aggressive mom. So half are her biological offspring, half are foster offspring. This is lyud america ila describing what happened. The workers, theyre all waiting for these foxes to give birth, and theyre waiting for the pups to get old enough that they can just watch them, and and heres what lyudmila said happened. The it was fascinating. Her foster came offspring were barely walking, but if this was a human standing by, they were already rushing to the cage doors and wagging their tails. She, the mother, was punishing her foster offspring for such improper behavior. She growled at them, grabbed their neck, through them back into the corner of the nest and what did they do but get up, walk over to the front of the cage and start licking the hands of humans. This is exactly what you would expect if tameness is due to genetic changes. Furthermore, the other pups, the biological, the genetic pups that were born to this aggressive mother, they retained their dignity. One of my favorite phrases. Growling aggressively the same as their mothers and running to their nests. They behaved like their genetic mom, and the foster pups behaved like their genetic mom. The changes are due to underlying genetics. The experiment is working. And so its working so well that lyudmila now diseases to push it as far as it can go. She wants to know just how far along the path of guest case these foxes have come, so she goes to belyaev with this audacious idea. Theres this tiny house on the experimental farm. She says i want to move in the house, and i want to live with unwith with one of the tame females 24 hours a day the way we live with our dogs. More importantly, the way that our ancestorslied with pro toedogs, and im going to take notes, have a journal, everything that happens. Belyaev gives her the go ahead, and lyudmila has the perfect fox in mind. The foxs name means tiny ball of fuzz, and this is the only known picture of her being pet by belyaev. From the moment she opened her arms, she was the most calm, social of the foxes lyudmila had ever met. She waited a year because she waited for pushinka to be pregnant. Now she could move into the house and watch her, but then she could watch her pups who from the moment they were born would be interacting with humans the way that we interabout with our dog pups interact with our dog pups. And she would take notes. Heres the outside of the experimental house. It still stands today, 45 years later, so this experiment is 1974. But on the inside, it might be hard to see, but its rubble now. Nonetheless, when i was this and it was 35 degrees outside and there were 3 feet of snow on the ground, lyudmila insisted that she give me a tour of the house, and she went from room to room saying here is where i used to pet pushinka, here is where the pups played with me. She lived with them exactly the way you would live with your dogs, playing with them, letting them run without a leash, they would respond to their name. So theyre living together. And about three months later, in july of 1974, something extraordinary happens. Its summer, and while this is what it looks like in the winter, in siberia it actually gets quite hot in the summer. Cold get 90 degrees could get 90 degrees. Every night she would sit on a little bench outside the house with a book reading around 6 p. M. This is july 1974. And every night when she did this, pushinka would lay by her side, and lyudmila would be reading her book and petting pushinka. Before this night lots of people had come to visit the experimental house. Everybody referred to it as pushinkas house, and whenever a vip would come around, theyd bring the vip to pushinkas house, and everything was always perfect. The domesticated foxes always behaved in a hyperfriendly way to humans. But on july 15th, lyudmila was petting pushinka reading her book, and heres what happened. Every night theres an theres a watchman who comes around and makes sure everything is fine on the farm, rightsesome but they had right . But they had just hired a new guard, a new watchman that nobody knew. And this potential was approaching perp was approach anything a brisk pace that might be interpreted as being somewhat aggressive. And pushinka sees this, she stands up, she bolts towards the night patch watchman and begins barking exactly the way that a dog barks. Lyudmila had never heard pushinka bark like this. She had to step back and say, wait a minute, its easy to infer that shes protecting me. Then Something Else happened. As soon as lyudmila began talking to the guard in a calm voice and it was clear that she was not in danger, pushinka stopped barking, went back down, sat next to the bench and waited for lyudmila to pet her again. Lyudmila is convinced that pushinka was standing up to defend her. Are there other explanations . Sure, but from that night on, she knew she would never leave this experiment, and she never has. So let me go and try and just in the next few minutes tell you some of the other remarkable things that have happened in this experiment. So i mentioned to you before that one of the things that happened in the mid 70s was that the domesticated foxes were breeding a little earlier and continuing to breed a little later. In the mid 1980s, something remarkable happened. In about 83 some of the domesticated females were ready to breed a second time. Not only in the normal time of january, but in september. They were ready to breed. That year there were no domesticated males who would mate with them. The next year a few more nest candidated females were domesticated females were ready to mate in september, and that year some of the males would mate. And lyudmila mated those pairs, and those females gave birth to not one, but two clutches of pups in the same year. Absolutely unheard of in the wild. Think about restructuring of the reproductive system thats necessary more that to happen. All as a function of them being selected on whether theyre tame and calm. Remarkable. Whats more, these animals were beginning to look eerily doglike. For example, when you look at their faces, when you think of a wild fox, you think of this long snout. When you measure the faces of the domesticated foxes, they have a rounder, more dog canlike snout. Doglike snout. Whats more, their bodies also changed. Another thing you think of with foxes when you think of wild foxes is they have these really [inaudible] limbs that allow hem to run around quickly. Domesticated foxes are chunkier and lower to the ground. Again, all of this as a result of selecting on behavior and only behavior. As time went on and new tools became available, lyudmila began working with people to understand the underlying no molecular changes that happen during domestication. And so she worked with a woman by the name of anna, and they looked at nest case at the genetic level. And they asked all sorts of questions. One of them was this if you look at the fox genome, do you find that the changes associated with domestication are kind of localized in one area on one chromosome, or are they kind of spread everywhere . And when they asked that question, they found that many of those traits associated with domestication were located on fox chromosome 12. Now, thats interesting. Know where they are. More interesting is at the same time people who work on dog domestication were asking the exact same question in dogs. And so now they could compare the underlying molecular genetics of dog nest case and fox nest case. And domestication. You can easily map out that fox chromosome 12 is found in parts of three different dog chromosomes, and one of these dog chromosomes is where most of the underlying genetic change that occurred in dog domestication is found. So even at that deepest level, it looks like theyre mimicking in a very general way what happened inog dog nest case. Im going to finish up with one last thing, one last trait. First of all, trait did not appear until the experiment had been going on for 45 years. Today if you worked on the same experimental system for 20 years, youd be getting a Lifetime Achievement award. You wouldnt each come close to finding what were going to see here. The other thing i lo is its hard to imagine anything more perfect in a domesticated pet. So lyudmila with one of her colleagues were studying the sounds, the vocalizations that these foxes made. And what they found was this. The tame fox toes and only the tame foxes made two kinds of vocalizations. One of them sounds like this oh, darn. The sound is not can you hear that at all . That sound, if you map it onto a specktrogram, is the closest sound to human laughter that any nonhuman species makes. Its hard to imagine a more perfect thing to have in your domesticated species than this. They dont know how this emerged, why it emerged, but the fact that it did is almost too remarkable. So if you ask lyudmila today, 58 years later, about her aspirations, her hopes and dreams for the, peopler and believe me, i asked her what shell tell you is a number of things. First of all, she wants to be able to have these registered as official house pets. Right now there are a few dozen that live in houses, but theyre not theyre still considered exotics. Theres a board at the International Level that allows you to certify something as a house pet. She wants them to be certified as a house pet. She wants more of them to be living with people in their houses. The other thing lyudmila will tell you is one day ill be gone, but i want my foxes and the experiment to live forever. I know i do, and i hope you do as well. And thank you very much. [applause] yes. And now we have a bit of time, and if you have a question, please come up to the mic there, and ill be happy to answer it for you. While do this, ill put a few domesticated foxes playing in the snow up there for you to enjoy. [laughter] any questions at all . Do they shed a lot . Do they shed a lot, yes. There are two problems associated with them becoming true house pets. They shed a lot, and they really stink. And this is the problem. But, well, the third problem is they get so excited about interacting with humans that they pee all over you all the time. [laughter] but aside from those little things, theyre trainable, theyll fetch, theyll do everything your dog will do. Yes. Did you have a question over there . Was lysenko, was he involved in the [inaudible] the question is, was lysenko involved in the collectivization that was occurring at time. Yes, in the sense that, basically, he tried to convince stalin and everybody when the soviet union is essentially starving to death because of various policies like collectivization, hes convincing them that his brand of genetics that had long been disproven would allow them to, for example, produce crops at a level that would feed everybody else. And they basically made up data so that it appeared that was the case. And thats how and thats one way that he sort of rose up in the power structure. Yes. How did they explain away their experiment and not get in trouble . Right. Its a great question. Basically, what they did was they told the authorities that they were working on fox physiology and fox fur color. Which was all true. That was something they were certainly keeping track of. So they basically hid under the radar and lysenko and the people in power probably kind of knew what was going on, but so much money was coming into the soviet union because of fox breeding that they kind of turned the other way. But they told them some of the things they were interested in, but not the things that would set off bells. Nonetheless, there were a number of instances where they almost got shut down. Khrushchev himself was at the academic village and came this close to shutting down the institute that belyaev and lyudmila were associated with. It didnt happen, but it was only because of khrushchevs daughter. She convinced him to not Pay Attention to what lysenko was saying when he was beginning to wane this power. And so khrushchev didnt close the experiment down but almost did. Yes. At one point you were talking about pushkin, and he was approached by a strange caretaker or something . What happened . I couldnt understand what happened. Pushinka was sitting by lyudmila, and every night a guard would come around and basically make everything was okay on the farm. And that night the guard was a new one. When they were approaching, when she was approaching lyudmila, she was doing so in a fairly brisk way that might have been interpreted by pushinka as aggressive. And thats when she got up, bolted towards the guard and began barking the way that a dog would bark when they were protecting their master. David. Thank you for a wonderful presentation. My question is about the genetics. And now that we have new Genetic Technologies yes. And we know where roughly on the chromosome these genes are located, could you comment on whether we could imagine, say, taking american foxes or other canines and using some of this insight for [inaudible] perhaps and produce some animals that were domesticated through some Genetic Technology . Yeah. So its a good question. I only touched on some of the genetics theyre doing. In fact, most of the changes that they see in the domesticated foxes are not replacement of one gene allele by another; but, rather, differences in how active the genes are. Gene expression patterns are what they see differences in. Thats where most of the action at the genetic level is. I dont know, id actually have to think about your question whether or not you could take that information and use it to even create an experiment where you even got domestication faster. I suppose that in principle its possible that if you could use crisper or other technologies to insert or delete particular sections, that you might be able to speed up process. I dont know that they have ever thought about that yet, but i could ask lyudmila and get back to you. Yes. [inaudible] any other studies that were long term interests . Another book for you, perhaps . Yes. The question is did belyaev have any other longterm interests. Many, but the key ones are that if you go to the other side of the experimental fox farm where i was showing you the pictures, there are hundreds of minks. Under belyaevs leadership for the last 40 years, they have been running the equivalent of the domestication experiment using minks. Selecting for the calmest in one line and the most aggressive in the other, and they find results that are remarkably parallel to the foxes. When you select for calm, tame minks, you get them, but you also get changes in the color, changes in the facial structural, changes that parallel what happened in the foxes. He was involved in many, many things. Theyve actually also done this same domestication experiment in rats, selecting for tame rats, a aggressive rats. Again, you get the behavioral differences, but you get all those other differences as well. Finish in the book we talk about working ideas on why thats so. So one thing i havent told you is, okay, they select for behavior, and lo and behold they get all these other things that we associate with domestication. But why . Whats going on that allows that . People are studying that. We dont have the time to get into the details, but theyre beginning to understand at the genetic level how all these things are connected. Other questions. Okay. Well, thank you so much for allowing me to tell you this story. [applause] [inaudible conversations] good afternoon. My name is nathan buttrey, and ill be your host for an hour here. I want to welcome everybody whos with us and who is watching on booktv to the southern festival of books sponsored by humanities tennessee. First want to say thank you to all of those who donate to humanities tennessee. Its your individual donations that make this event and events

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