A fascinating long experiment conducted in Siberia since the 1960s shows how this would work and reveals something surprising about the evolution of tameness in both dogs and people. The experiment concerned foxes, but its point is more general. In 1937 Nikolai Belyaev, a well-known geneticist, was arrested and executed without trial for showing an unhealthy interest in Western genetic science. His brother Dmitri was just twenty at the time, but he went on to become a geneticist, too, though he was very careful to pay lip service to the prevailing environmentalist dogma of Stalinism. He went
...more
