Russian foxes bred for tameness may not be the domestication story we thought
For the last 60 years, scientists in Siberia have bred silver foxes to be increasingly tame, with the goal of revealing the evolutionary and genetic underpinnings of domestication. This research also famously showed a link between tameness and such physical changes as curled tails and spotted coats, known as “domestication syndrome.” But that story is flawed, some researchers now claim. The foxes weren’t totally wild to begin with, and some of the traits attributed to domestication existed long before the experiment began, Elinor Karlsson, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, and her colleagues argue. What’s more, the researchers cast doubt on whether domestication syndrome even exists, in a paper published online December 3 in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The impressively long silver fox experiment, ongoing at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk since 1960, didn’t seek to breed foxes that looked so different from their wild counterparts. But several generations after geneticist Dmitry Belyaev took...