Natural Resource Governance Speaker Series - Lee Dugatkin: How to Tame a Fox and Build a Dog: Evolution and a Six-Decade, Ongoing, Experiment in Domestication

For the last six decades, researchers in Siberia have been domesticating silver foxes to replay the evolution of the dog in real time. Lyudmila Trut has been lead scientist on this work since 1959, and with biologist and historian of science, Lee Dugatkin, she tells the inside story behind it all. Like a set of Russian nesting dolls, How to Tame a Fox opens up to reveal story after story, each embedded within the one that preceded it. Inside this tale of pathbreaking science in the -35° winters of Siberia is hidden a collaboration between an older, freethinking genius and a trusting, brilliant, gutsy young woman, who risked their careers, indeed their lives, to make scientific history. Go one level deeper and you have the magical tale of how some hardscrabble humans and the animals they domesticated developed such deep attachments that both seemed to forget the species divide between them.