httafarad CH 8 through 10

chapter 8

1985 was awesome in America.  In the USSR it was a time of great tumult. They want an xray machine but with all the tumult they couldn't get one.  So they have to do measurements manually and they find that there are a number of physical differences between the tame foxes and the agressive foxes.  Berlin wall comes down in 1990.  Shortly after the USSR disolves and chaos reigns.  The fox farm has an immediate crisis cuase they don't have any money.  They somehow got enough funding to feed the foxes.  They aren't doing any science, but the foxes are ok.  The bottom fell out of the Russian economy in 1998.  She desperately sent a letter to the US magazine American Scientist in an appeal for money.  Foxes are dying from starvation.  She's going to need to sell some foxes for their fur to keep some of the foxes alive.  This is a horrible sadness.

March/April 1999 her article gets published.  People start sending her money.  It was a very hard/sad decade from the fall of the USSR til then.  But now they're pretty much up and running again.  

There's a hotshot geneticist named Anna that Ludmila is trying to get involved.  On January 4th 2000 Anna flies to Nova Subirsk.  They collect blood from all the foxes in record time.  We're doing some real hard core science now.

Chapter 9

Lots of talk about birds and their smartness.  Also more talk about chimps and bonobos and how social evolution in animals can be just as important as their genetic and intelectual evolution.  Brian Hare is getting his PHD and he is going to academdoravak to study the foxes.  

They're doing all sorts of studies of these tame foxes vs dogs.  Hare is now totally on board with the general idea that genes for tameness might go hand in hand.

A scientific hot shot named Sveta who's into animal communication is getting involved.  Sveta LOVES a fox named kfedra.  She's trying to see if tame foxes communicate different from the control group.  Lots of cool sounds got categorized.  The tame foxes did this thing that sounded like human laughter. The wild foxes absolutely did not.

Chapter 10

We're gonna try to map the fox genome.  That's a pretty big deal.

The trick is they're gonna try to use genetic markers from dogs, who's genome has already been mapped.

you've come a long way baby, 45 years ago they couldn't even call what they were doing a genetic study.  Now we're doing it out in the open and it's great.  Gordon Lark (looked him up, he died a month and a half ago) from the University of Utah is getting in on this.  It's a very different world we're living in.  That xray machine that was a big problem back in 1985, no problem now that they're getting donations from all over in the free world of 2005.  In 2011 we're doing even more genoming and we found Cromazome 12 is significant in that the tame foxes have that chromazome far more similar to modern dogs than the control group of foxes.  They're doing genetic test on the prefrontal quartex of the brain.  Big differences between the tame and wild foxes.  Ludmila and Anna are still working on mapping the genome of these foxes.  30 years after his death a lot of Boliath's theories are being proven.