We all grew up believing it would take long periods of time,
a slow process of evolution, in order to involve,
in order to transform a wolf into a dog.
But, boy, from the archaeological records or whatever,
it was an instant of time.
How could it be possible for one species to evolve suddenly into another.
Clues were to emerge unexpectedly from
an experiment conducted in the old Soviet Union.
I really think that the Belyaev experiments was one of the most
significant experiments in
evolution that took place in the twentieth century,
and it affected my life and my thinking in so many ways.
The experiment was begun in the 1950s at a fox farm in Siberia.
The foxes were being bred for their fur,
but they were wild animals that were hard to handle and
often too stressed to breed.
Dmitry Belyaev, a geneticist, was taken on to see if he could
develop foxes that would be easier to keep.
He began his experiment by breeding together those
foxes with the least excitable temperaments.
Belyaev selected foxes by a simple method.
He extended a gloved hand into each animal's cage.
The foxes that attacked, cowered,
or bit him were excluded from breeding.
But those that showed tolerance
or curiosity were mated together.
In effect, Belyaev was selecting the foxes for their flight distance.
The subsequent results were staggering.
The new generations of foxes were transformed,
not just in behavior but in their appearance.
Within just ten years, the selected foxes showed new
variety in their color.
Some were born with mottled coats or black
and white patches.
Their ears became floppy.
They started to bark, vocalize.
They became highly playful even into adulthood and were no
longer afraid of people.
Some of the foxes even began to answer to their names.
Belyaev had stumbled across the discovery that selecting for the
quality of tameness alone could
set off a cascade of other changes.
We can still see evidence of this quantum leap at the same
research center today.
Up to that point, we all kind of believed Darwin,
and Darwin said nature does not go in leaps.
Things don't happen fast.
They happen gradually.
And the answer was with Belyaev experiment - he was wrong.
They do go in leaps and sometimes big leaps.
Things that you wouldn't expect.
The theory is here that we're dealing with some underlying
structure.
When we're dealing with tameness,
we're dealing with a set of genetics that is producing a
characteristic response.
It is not a coincidence that many domesticated animals are
black and white.
When selection is made for tameness,
it impacts on the entire makeup of the animal.
Scientists have determined that adrenalin,
the fight or flight hormone, and melanin, the skin and fur pigment,
are chemically connected, so they change together,
as are the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenaline which
control behaviors.
Affect one system, and there is a domino effect from color to behaviors.
Koppenja's scavenging wolves may have undergone a similar
transformation.
When all of a sudden Belyaev's experiments...
It changed the way a lot of us began to think about dogs.
People talked about...
Why did people select dogs to have this coat color or
that coat color and so on?
Why did people select dogs to bark?
And then all of a sudden we realized those were a bunch of
really silly questions,
because we could get all of that just by selecting for tameness.
Belyaev created foxes that looked and behaved like dogs.
His experiment suggested that the transformation of the wild
wolf into the dog could have happened in the blink of an
evolutionary eye.
The stage was set for the development of the dog
into the incredible variety we have today.