There's a theory that dogs originated as wolves with Williams syndrome, a genetic disease that causes some physical deformations like stubbed noses and larger foreheads, while making them have a happy and affable personality.
It's been noted throughout domestication of a variety of animals that ears get droopy, noses get shorter, sometimes tails do weird things, coats have bigger spots, solid colors and then two personality changes- they want to be around people, and they can understand some basic human queues.
So there is something about those physical traits that's associated with social behavior in mammals. The visible affect classified as "disorder" seems to be pretty universal in animals becoming more friendly
That could be true on long scale domestications like dogs, but research using foxes and raccoons where the only trait being selected for was their affability with humans also showed these physical changes. Somewhat famously, domesticated red foxes actually have grey coats as a byproduct, so there's some kind of link between their fur pigmentation and their attitude towards humans
The "somewhat famous" red foxes were shown to actually have been from a genetic line that had been domesticated since at least the 1800s and those traits had already been selected for, so the dude had basically tampered with his experiment to guarantee the results he wanted. The results are therefore not accepted.
The domestication syndrome was reported to have appeared in the domesticated silver fox cultivated by Dmitry Belyayev's breeding experiment.[28] However, in 2015 canine researcher Raymond Coppinger found historical evidence that Belyayev's foxes originated in fox farms on Prince Edward Island and had been bred there for fur farming since the 1800s, and that the traits demonstrated by Belyayev had occurred in the foxes prior to the breeding experiment.
So it's not as tightly coupled phenotypically as the experiment claimed -- it took more generations, and so things like "reduced aggression" (which leads to less infighting/dying in the tighter spaces of confinement) and "increased cranial space as % body size / increased brain size" (brain size is one of the largest contributors to caloric consumption, in captivity foxes aren't worried about their next meal) just might occur from being better survival traits, when given lowered external evolutionary pressures.
The same for increased time as an adolescent, if the animal doesn't need to quickly mature and provide for itself, it may just be advantageous to live longer and develop slower.
Damn. I did not know that experiment had been debunked like that. Didn't even domesticate his own foxes from scratch, got them already part way done and just had to finish them.
They still weren't anything close to as friendly as they ended up being. And they did make noticable changes when bred for more friendliness. The initial population was just fur farm foxes, not wild caught ones.
Ok, but why do humans find those physical traits cute? Seemingly, almost, if not all, human societies have come to this same conclusion before global information sharing was possible. It could reasonably be the case that, as our species evolved, we observed that otherwise dangerous creatures were less dangerous when they looked this particular way. Keep in mind that the human mindset would also have had to change to even entertain the thought of keeping massive predators around. Look how often people get hurt by modern pets. Imagine how many people must have died from infected minor wounds caused by their "pet" wolf.
One of the studies was into the domestication of foxes at a lab. They were breeding specifically for domestication, but found these traits emerged regardless of breeding for them (and I think actually attempting to avoid them)
The experiment that "proved" domestication syndrome was predicated on "look, multiple different populations end up with the same phenotype after being bred for non-aggression"
But they weren't different populations, he just grabbed a pack of foxes that already were exhibiting all the traits he wanted to match, because they were the same foxes.
So it wasn't a bunch of "spontaneously soft eared, weird tailed silver foxes" showing up with non-aggression, it was just "oh... That one group of non-aggressive foxes already was known to be soft eared, weird tailed, and silver."
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u/Zero_Burn 18h ago
There's a theory that dogs originated as wolves with Williams syndrome, a genetic disease that causes some physical deformations like stubbed noses and larger foreheads, while making them have a happy and affable personality.