Kent Hovind vs. a Molecular Biologist (The limitations of science)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 31, 2019, 15:46 (1571 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

The fox domestication study has doubters:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/russian-foxes-tameness-domestication

"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.

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"It’s no secret that the foxes weren’t truly “wild,” Karlsson says. The Soviet foxes originally came from fur farms on Prince Edward Island in Canada, with selective breeding dating back to at least the 1880s. One of Karlsson’s colleagues, on vacation on the island, stumbled across fur farm photographs from the 1920s during a visit to a local museum. Those foxes appeared tame with spotted coats — one of the same domestication traits claimed as a by-product of the Russian experiment that supposedly took generations to emerge.

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"Dispute aside, Karlsson says she still views the fox experiment as tremendously important. Belyaev and his colleagues “were remarkably successful in selecting on behavioral traits and showing that they can create populations that have very different behaviors,” she says, noting that this has spurred ongoing research into the genetic and neurological elements to these behavioral changes (SN: 8/6/18).

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"Going forward, Karlsson thinks that research on domestication would be well-served by stepping away from domestication syndrome and thinking more about how these animals may be self-domesticating, driving their own modifications by adapting to people. As human influence grows in wild spaces, many species are likely changing in response to us, she says.

“'Rather than worrying about our assumptions for what domestication is, looking at how species are changing to adapt to our presence would be — in some ways — a more intriguing way to think about the problem,” Karlsson says."

Comment: It is obvious that domestication must start with animals that tend to be somewhat friendly.