7. Behavioral Genetics II

Stanford University.

Something incredibly cool I just found out about yesterday,

which, oh, I wish I had known about two days ago,

but still, it's useful.

You remember those Siberian foxes and that amazing thing?

You breed them for tameness, purely on a behavioral trait,

and come back 30 generations later,

and they look like puppies.

They have the short muzzles, and the big roundy eyes,

and the cute ears, and they wag their tails

and all of that, punchline there being, number one,

evolution can move really fast.

Number two in some interesting, mysterious way,

if you are selecting for certain behavioral traits--

in this case, one where you like being around humans

and are all cuddly with them-- what you're also going

to select for are a whole bunch of traits

that are associated with baby wolves in terms

of physical appearance.

Turns out, there's a flip side of this going on right now

with what are known as metro dogs, which are dogs that live

in the subway system in Moscow.

And I don't know, but they live in there,

and a whole deal was made out of the number of them which

get on subways and know which stops they're going to.

And there's an entire website devoted

to metro dogs, which are in Russian,

but it has lots of nice pictures.

But what they're seeing there is that these

are dogs who, essentially, have been feral

and in feral packs for decades and decades.

And what have they been being selected for?

Being able to scrounge, being, in fact, quite scared

of humans, a lot of the time staying far from them

whenever possible because they are raiding garbage

cans, who knows what.

And what they're seeing in the metro dogs

is about 30 generations into it now,

their tails are looking more like the tails