103 - Lee Dugatkin - Jumpstarting Evolution

Two for Tea Podcast

Lee’s book with Lyudmila Trut, How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution (2017) can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Tame-Fox-Build-Dog/dp/022644418X I also highly recommend Behind the Crimson Curtain: The Rise and Fall of Peale's Museum (2020): https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Crimson-Curtain-Peales-Museum/dp/1941953727 Follow Lee on Twitter @LeeDugatkin Timestamps 1:27 Behind the Crimson Curtain and other books 2:59 The silver fox breeding project 14:13 When you select for tameness, you get a suite of other changes; evolution through changes to gene expression, rather than changes to the genes themselves. 22:36 Evo devo 24:51 The cascade of apparently unrelated changes which appear when you select for one trait. Neural crest cells. Why do tame animals often have floppy ears? 32:18 Other changes associated with domestication; cross-fostering experiments 40:08 Humans as self-domesticated apes 46:46 The amazing people working on the fox domestication experiments 54:34 More thoughts on early human–wolf interactions