It takes extreme dedication on one's part to keep an experiment going for at least 10 or 20 years, but Dmitri Belyaev has been doing this experiment for almost 60 years. He wanted to know how our early human ancestors were able to domesticate animals, their process for choosing which animals to befriend, and how they tamed and trained them. So what he did was to make a "dog out of a fox" essentially.
No one had ever attempted anything like it. No matter, he would try. At the time, in Stalinist Russia, the idea was considered radical and out of line with State orthodoxy. There were men who might very well have thrown the scientist in prison for what he was dreaming. But he would perform his magic in a far off, frozen land: The Siberian town of Novosibirsk, where winter temperatures can plummet to a bone-chilling -50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Some 60 years later, his experiment is still going. It is one of the longest running science experiments ever, having outlived even its creator. And after all this time, it is still shaping the way we think about fundamental questions in biology — and even influencing the way we understand our own evolutionary trajectory.
Of course, things didn't go smoothly as planned. Read more of the story at Undark.
(Image credit: zoofanatic/Flickr)
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