Siberian silver fox (Photo: Zefram/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Please Note: This program has a rescheduled date (originally May 12, 2025).
Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs but foxes. They are the result of one of the most astonishing experiments in breeding ever undertaken, intended to speed up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades.
Starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms, Soviet biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out in 1959 to mimic the evolution of wolves into dogs in order to witness the process of domestication, which originally took about 15,000 years. Within a decade, their fox breeding experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes with floppy ears, piebald spots, and curly tails. Along with these physical changes came genetic and behavioral changes. The foxes were bred using selection criteria for tameness, and with each generation, they became increasingly interested in human companionship. To date, 65 generations of foxes have been domesticated, and scientists continue to learn significant lessons from them about the genetic and behavioral evolution of domesticated animals.
Evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin goes inside this groundbreaking experiment to reveal how scientific history is made. Dugatkin is co-author with Trut of How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution.
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