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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday March 14 2018, @08:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the make-it-get-me-my-slippers dept.

Researchers have seen signs of "domestication syndrome", including patches of white fur and shorter snouts, in mice that had some contact with humans but were not subject to "intense and directed selection regimes":

The accident began in 2002 when scientists studying mouse behavior and disease transmission trapped a dozen wild mice in a barn in Illnau, Switzerland. The animals were free to come and go and nest and mate as they pleased. Their new digs were also safe from predators—the mouse doorways were too small to allow domestic cats, owls, and martens to enter. The barn also contained plenty of free food and water, provided by the researchers every few weeks. The mice that didn't mind the visits stuck around and eventually blossomed to a steady population of 250–430 animals. Some even began to run over the researchers' shoes instead of scurrying away. That's a sign that these animals had lost their fear of humans, even without the researchers deliberately breeding the most human-friendly mice, as scientists had done with the foxes.

Four years later, Anna Lindholm, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, began to notice white patches of fur on a few of the russet-colored mice. "It was really rare," she says—in some mice, the white splotches made up of as few as eight hairs. From 2010 to 2016, the proportion of adult mice with white fur patches more than doubled [open, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.172099] [DX], the team reports today in Royal Society Open Science.

Serendipitously, Lindholm had also been measuring the mice's heads for another project. And, just like the Siberian foxes, the mice became smaller and their heads shrank—about 3.5% on average. That's an "exciting" change that suggests self-domestication can occur as a result of natural selection, says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the work.


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  • (Score: 2, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:08PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:08PM (#652594)

    It's all the same. Pale hair and behavior changes go together.

    There is even an explanation for it. It's something related to the migration of neural crest stem cells.

    If you are not hostile to science that may be inconvenient, you'll realize and accept that this likely applies to humans. A bunch of blonde people, for example the Swedish people, might be relatively unbothered by the danger of potentially hostile migrants. It's kind of the "dumb blonde" stereotype, except that "dumb" is not accurate. It's more like "too trusting" or "too much of a risk taker" or "not street smart".

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:42PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:42PM (#652617)

    Redheads will fuck you senseless, then she cuts your nuts off.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:58AM (#652886)

      Seems like a fair trade.

  • (Score: 1) by Derf the on Wednesday March 14 2018, @10:10PM (1 child)

    by Derf the (4919) on Wednesday March 14 2018, @10:10PM (#652633)

    I agree with your migration (in-completed) of the neural crest stem cells (during fetal development) [see white socks and blazes on horses and in-complete melanin production]; and thus also find interesting your "blonde" theory and support it with my observations of "more successful at obtaining above average share of resources in an 'allocated resource environment'", they are 'liked' more and helped more because of that.
    Domestication has brought unheralded benefits to cats and dogs; chickens, well there is their enormous proliferation of their DNA but since statistically it is almost entirely now living only within Gulags or the Death Camps I think the jury is still out for all but an elite of them.

    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:15AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:15AM (#652892) Journal

      Not sure about in USA, but I suspect it is similar to rural Oz. Many people living rural/country here (Oz) would have chooks*. A large minority in small towns, a large majority of people living on farms/acreage.
      Statistically their DNA may be mostly in the gulags, but even ignoring those, in absolute terms chooks have still been more successful by being domesticated.

      *The adult bird is a chook. Hen or rooster/cock depending on sex. A chicken is a baby chook. And fuck the marketers who think that calling an adult bird by the name of a baby will make it sound more tender and palatable.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.