httafarad CH 5-7

Chapter 5

This chapter is about the foxes that are living in the house.  Pushinka and her descendants.  They just have a few foxes living in the house.  Ludmilla stops spending the night at the house.  They talk about Jane Goodall.  Pushinka plays dead and kills a crow.

They're doing embriotic transplants between aggressive and domestic foxes.  We're gonna test nature vs nurture.  Nature FTW.  1977 was a bummer cause of the murder.

Chapter 6

We're getting into the eighties here and we're doing a lot more hormone testing.  One specific study was one where they had a control group of foxes that were simply out in the sun more often and they found those foxes had the hormones associated with mating more frequently than foxes that were hiding away more often.  This goes along with the overall program goal of trying to figure out why domestic dogs mate much more than wild wolves and foxes.

The Afghanistan war made it even harder to interact with the international science community even harder.  Even so, they were able to have Manning from the Scotland conference in 1971 come to visit the institute of science and genetics in Siberia.  It was a good visit.  Much eating and smoking and happy times with the foxes.  For his efforts Manning was interrogated by mi-5 about Soviet wheat.

Chapter 7

Coco the fox is beloved.  She was born weak and while she lived longer than they initially thought she would, she did die young.  She had adventures because she lived most of her life with a couple of scientists in their apartment in the city.

Now is the time for Belaski to openly discuss theories on destabilizing selection and domestication as they apply to human evolution.  Lots of talk about protohumans.  He presented this at.the genetics conference in India in 1984.  The basic idea in that once humans became social they very quickly started acting like modern humans.  Maybe that's why the missing link is so elusive.  Lots of talk about bonobos versus chimpanzees.

Beliath was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1985.  Don't smoke.  It's bad for you.