Domestication - it's a matter of time (always is for me, that's my`hammer' for all nails)

They started barking. They improvedon their performance in cognitive experiments. They startedbreeding earlier in spring, and many of them started breeding twicea year. Most of the people reacting to this experiment invoked pleiotropy,i.e., how changes in one gene affect expression of many othergenes.

See this NYT article for instance . However, even while I was reading it for the first time, my mindscreamed – development ! And not just development, but more specifically, heterochrony – change in timing of developmental event. If you alter the expression of one of the genes that affects developmental timing , you affect all sorts of things. For instance, when the neural crest cells migrate they becomemelanocytes in the skin – if due to changes in timing theyare late to arrive to some distal parts, e.g., paws and tail-tips,those part will be white. Neural crest cells also migrate to becomethe adrenal medulla – that little part of the body thatreleases (nor)epinephrine (adrenaline).

If fewer of those cellsarrive there on time, less the animal will show stress-responselater in life. There appears to be tight correlation between timers that act ondifferent scales, e.g., developmental and circadian timing, circadian and fast behavioral timing, circadian and seasonal timing, etc. I always wished I could get a lab, some foxes, an IACUC approvaland some money to run these animals through a battery of standardexperiments comparing dogs, wild foxes and domesticated foxes onall sorts of parameters of circadian rhythms, photoperiodism (theydid change their seasonality patterns of breeding, after all), etc. The bottom line is that a subtle change in timing of expression ofa single developmental gene, something one can select for bychoosing one of the traits (in this case a behavioral trait), willaffect the change in timing of expression in many other genes. The difference between wild and domesticatedfoxes may not be in any DNA sequence at all – it couldpresumably be all epigenetic ( see also ).

Sequence differences would arise later, as the two populationsare not inter-mixing any more (for over 60 years now). When you put together development , genetics and evolution , you can see that big changes (or, really, any changes at the verybeginning of the evolutionary change) in DNA sequence are notnecessary for big changes in entire suites of phenotypic traits.But in the 1950s, the bean-bag deterministic genetics was the norm,so the Belyaev experiment was a big jolt to the scientificcommunity in the West (not so much for the Russian evolutionary biologists, though), so we need to look at thisexperiment through a decent grasp of history . Now, I'd like to know what is the state of the experimenttoday. Ten years ago, the project appeared doomed – they hadto sell foxes for fur in order to keep going at a small scale. Hasthis been fixed? Has anyone from the West help finance thecontinuation of the project? Has anyone in the West acquired someof the foxes and continued with the project? What are the recentdevelopments? Related at Scientific American : Man s new best friend? A forgotten Russian experiment in foxdomestication by Jason G.

Goldman Learning from Domesticated Foxes by The Dog Zombie The Russian Fox Study by Jason G. Goldman.

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