The ending comment of this show is that perhaps as the human population gets bigger we will have to get along and may "evolve" to become more peaceable. In actual studies of animal populations, crowding can sometimes have the opposite effect and promote behaviors like aggression, cannibalism, etc. See a summary done in 1973 by John A. King entitled The Ecology of Aggressive Behavior in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vol. 4 117-138 (1973). This is a complicated subject and there are no one size fits all answers.

that's not awesome man why would you do that to a animal like that i'm going to laugh if it eats your eyes and finger and toes and craps on your face!!

wow what followers copying me and dylan

This was so cool. I'm so glad that my science teacher assingned this it was so cool. Thats cool how the cells don't finish their jobs the dogs or foxes ears become floppy at the top. Thank you so much Mrs. Moretz for making this our homework.

this was VERY interesting! i liked it alot!

This was really cool and interesting! I'm glad my science teacher assigned it!:) well kinda.

Wow! This was really interesting because the more the foxes became demesticated the more their physical charachteristics changed!

My science teacher from slcse assigned this homework me and my freind preston thought this was cool

very interesting

They spoke about the effect of fear and adrenaline on mother foxes on the development of the foetuses in the womb, but they didn't mention this in relation to humans. A large factor may be that as humans have settled into communities pregnant women have felt safer, thus the foetus is subject to less stress, which effects its development. If this is the case then a far more effective way of "breeding" gentler humans is simply to ensure that pregnant women are well looked after, relieved of stress and given top medical care.

Fascinating segment on domestication. To take this a speculative step further, one wonders if some populations might be less "domesticated" than others - I know this is risque - say, in the Middle East?

look, now these foxes are for sale! http://www.sibfox.com/foxes/

I'm catching up on a backlog of Radiolab podcasts, and just got to this piece. Very interesting!

I'm having trouble understanding what it has to do with evolution, though. From what the piece says, it appears that population isolation and artificial selection have created a bottleneck effect; on the genetic or developmental level, functionality has been removed, not added, and their fitness to survive appears to have been compromised. I mean, yes, the animals have changed, but mere change alone does not equal evolution, especially if something has been lost in the process. How is that evolution?

I was just wondering (taking a joke about us having floppy ears at the end seriously) if our ears used to have bones in them? And then, because of docile selection like the foxes, they're all cartilage now instead of bones? But I don't know if lack of bone formation was the direct cause of the floppy ears in the foxes. Just a thought I had, but I'm no biologist.

I didn't like the implication that the human aggression that starts wars is physical-- show me a single modern war started by a physically strong male. It's almost always a greedy, cowardly, rich, frequently weak, frequently old, average-sized or small male with money for weapons and media-control that starts a war or puts a whole society at undue risk. Young people whose parents were poor or didn't want them are the ones who ultimately most frequently go to prison. Deviousness, selfishness, and judgmentalism are the human problems I'd say we'd have to "breed out," to stop wars, not rare athletes. It doesn't require athleticism to harm people. Many of the most divisive large-scale destructive people you'll meet are quite small in stature. Playing outside and eating vegetables and protein helps you grow--it doesn't necessarily make you more aggressive or less evolved than people who played Nintendo and ate candy all day. Some athletes are mean, but I personally believe they are outnumbered by "geek players"

i'm currently hooked on radiolab - i don't know how my work days will go once i make it through the archives of amazing old shows.

i'm wondering if you could tell me the name of the piece at the end of the last segment? sounds like cello - is this a classical piece? or a missing zoe keating track?

Great Show! I would like to point out that Genghis Khan, the warrior and conquerer, is now believed to be an ancestor of over 8% of people living in the former Mongol empire. This seems to imply that human evolution selects FOR aggressive traits at some times.

While the topic was engrossing and a complicated theory cogently explained,the commentators' numerous joking references to the killing of the non-docile foxes were sadly out of place. They added nothing to an otherwise excellent piece.

Yes we do feel we can change who we are.

Spinoza said our social constructions are expressions of our divinity. And so we have to evolve our social constructions in order to end war, like our Constitutions which grant or limit power of a few over the rest of us.

War will end someday when we take away the prerogative of ruling elites to start wars. History shows that wars are started because they enrich elites through raping and terrorizing and then pillaging and expanding territory. They seed and start ethnic conflicts on the ground between little people to cover up the land grab they're undertaking, and to enlist foot soldiers fired up by ideology or religion.

The proof is that the Europeans ended 1000s of years of war amongst themselves for the last 60 years now by a new social construction (European Union) and by removing the power of Aristocrats and Military Industrialists over the new and fledgling Parliaments by reforming their Constitutions, corporate governance, and media ownership laws. Maybe removing Aristos and Industrialists from power is like removing the power of the "alpha" male in the baboons.

In the US, we now need to do the same thing, remove the power of our military industrial and oil companies from seeding conflicts all over the world, and then snowing Americans through complicit media empires into paying for a manufactured war to cover up their raping and pillaging. That will mean changing their campaign finance laws, our Constitution and Supreme Court case law.

Ring a bell? As Edmund Burke said "those who don't know history are forced to relive it?" Well, some of us know history, and some of us know the remedies others have used now well proven over 65 years!

Here's a page I came across with videos of the Belyaev experiments: http://www.overpill.com/2009/12/21/soviet-scientist-turns-foxes-into-puppies/.

Love the show!

Great show, very thought provoking!

@Miguel
Interesting reflection, I'm not sure if apathy is the opposite of aggression. Taking the argument that we breed out aggressive behaviour, if we are talking murderers, etc. wouldn't it be only unjustified aggression that is bread out, ie. individuals who cannot control their adrenals, or desires? The person who reacts in legitimate defence (violent assertion does not equal aggression), will still be part of the society and gene pool.

Regards

This was a fantastic show, so much so that I had to listen to it twice. Even though I am now 24 and a college graduate, I am forced to recall a lesson from high school biology that discussed natural selection; the article that I read for this class, if I remember correctly, argued that natural selection no longer pertains to humans. Does this then mean that humans are able to evolve as a society without breeding out the unsavory folk?

Nevermind! I used Shazam for my iPhone and figured it out:
It's Bron-yr-Aur from Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti.

Like Anthony from St Louis, I also came to find out that name of that song. I know the song, I have listened to it over and over again, but I can't remember the name and it's driving me crazy.

Thanks!

Great show! What is the name of the acoustic song after the Stu segment? Is there a place where you reference all of the music that you sample? Thanks!

First off, I have to say that I truly enjoy how Jad and Robert make topics like this so engaging and thought provoking.

The last section really got me thinking. If society breeds out aggression through capital punishment and the other methods discussed, then will we as a society breed out our instinct to defend and protect ourselves? Is our new future one where we will be trapped in a juvenile state looking elsewhere in futility for protection that has been bred out of a few cultures? What about other cultures that continue to grow unfettered? How would the pacified culture defend itself?

In the recent video of a baby stroller falling in the path of a train, two individuals walk out of the station and appear to not react at all to the baby's harm. Surely they heard the mother screaming. If we breed out aggression, will we be reinforcing apathy?

i just came across an article on Reuters about a book called Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister. in that book he writes, "As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet." it seems that he is saying the same thing, basically that modern 'self-domesticated' humans are wimps compared to our ancestors.

Well done. it got me thinking.
Thanks

Fantastic! Among Radiolab's best.

Caught this story almost by mistake. I was sucked in from the start. The Fitch hypothesis is one I really hope is investigated further. Loved the sound effects too HEHE. Keep up the great stories

This episode is great and coincides perfectly with my Anthropology course!

This was a great piece. I read the American Scientist piece on Belyaev's foxes in the 1990s and taught from it in my human personality courses at Purdue University. You really put this together in a clear and cogent way. It makes a lot of important points about how evolution works (i.e., with the biological variability and control pathways that exist) and the fact that not all features that are the product of evolutionary processes are themselves adaptations in the sense that selection operated upon them specifically (e.g., the floppy ears are a by-product of selection for other phenotypes by virtue of being tied to the same developmental pathways). Keep up the great work!