Thanks. I've read about that experiment before, and I thought it was fascinating. But I had never actually seen the domesticated foxes, and I hadn't realize how freaking adorable they'd be.
I saw a TV programme about this, maybe 10-15 years ago and it dawned on me then that the scariest part of this was that it would only take the same amount of breeding to make humans as domesticated as this. Reminds me of S.M. Sterling's Draka novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination
Probably not true. Dogs - the species - have a large amount of genetic variation. There's a lot to play with. Humans do not have as nearly as much genetic variety across the species. A stat I read is that there's more genetic variety in a group of 50 chimps than in the entire human species.
This points to a genetic bottleneck in the past 100,000 years or so. Our ancestors were the few survivors of some catastrophic event.
Humans are domesticated relative to our ancestors / closest primate relatives. Anyway, I suspect the reason domestication works so fast is it's breaking down a chemical pathway which is fairly simple relative to creating a new sequence. Most young animals are minimally aggressive as baby's and it's only after they start to grow that they become aggressive. So just about any mutation effecting that transition sequence and they stay as infants.
If multicoloured coats were a development in domesticated wolves and foxes, then are humans really that far away? We went from a species with a very limited 'coat' colour, to everything from a near-white to black and all the natural pigment colours between.
I myself have four pigments to my beard, red/blonde/golden-brown/dark-brown. Only a few dozen generations ago when my ancestors didn't live in mega-communities on the order of millions, but lived in a community of a few hundred they likely had black hair between them all.
We're a predator species that is capable of living in numbers (without outside intervention) only surpassed by migratory birds and butterflies. We're not domesticated, because our purpose hasn't been changed to fit another species needs, however I would say with have been made extremely docile compared to our ancestors.
