Belinda Smith: Who doesn't love a story about puppies, with their floppy ears and goofy grins? How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) is a beautifully written heart-warming story from frozen Siberia, penned by Lee Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut. It's about an experiment into evolution, six decades old and counting, where Trut and her boss, Dmitry Belyayev, bred Siberian foxes in a bid to domesticate them. The work is considered one of the landmark studies of the 20th century, it has been massively successful, but its origins are shrouded in mystery and danger.

1950s Russia wasn't a great time or place to be a scientist. Under Stalin, studying genetics was a no-no. Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, with full support of Stalin, was a fervent campaigner against genetics, largely because it contradicted his own pseudoscientific views about inheritance. Instead of Mendelian evolution where characteristics are passed down generations through genes, Lysenko believed characteristics could be acquired. He didn't believe in DNA and railed against anyone who did. Top geneticists at Russian institutions were forced to resign. In some cases they were thrown into prison or killed.

But no amount of death threats could stop Dmitry Belyayev. He found ways to continue his work by disguising it as something more palatable to the regime. Dmitry worked at farms breeding foxes and mink. Valued for their fur, they were a major export for Russia, but Belyayev was intrigued by the claim that the first animal to be domesticated was the dog. How did wolves, these dangerous animals that themselves avoid humans, evolve into the sweet, loyal man's best friend? Even with the spectre of Lysenko and his cronies bearing down, Belyayev saw an opportunity to test his theory on the foxes.

Early in the experiment he enlisted the help of Lyudmila Trut, a student at the University of Moscow, and silver foxes were perfect subjects. Foxes and wolves belong to the same family but split about 10 million years ago. Breeding loads of foxes wouldn't raise too many eyebrows, and, if questioned, they could say they were trying to breed the best fur. But of course Belyayev and Trut couldn't care less about the fur, they started breeding together the least aggressive animals.

They thought they would eventually see the transition to doglike animals, but not nearly as quickly as they did. Remarkably, it happened in just a few generations. Signs were present even before the pup showed any overt behavioural or physical changes. A few of the workers were clearly forming a bond with the adult animals in just the second breeding season. Two generations later, Trut for the first time saw the first fox puppy wag its tail as she approached. Other signature dog behaviours like enjoying a good belly rub or licking a carer's hand or whining when left alone all appeared in the next two generations. The foxes also started taking on doglike facial characteristics, developing a shorter, stumpier snout and rounded ears.

But science can be a hard slog. Like today, funds were liable to suddenly disappear. 40 years after finding its feet under the genetics hating rule of the 1950s, the fox experiment was hit hard, twice. Once when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and again in 1998 when the Russian economy crashed. Imagine making the horrifying decision to kill some of your treasured animals to sell their fur to pay for food so the rest don't starve.

Aspects of the experiment have already been covered in books and articles, but in this book you really get the full story. In fact at times it can get bogged down in unnecessary detail, but then Lyudmila Trut was there, she was one of the project's architects, so it's hard to hold that against her.

How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) charts a route from the experiment's conception to the present day. There is no need for specialist knowledge in the genetics. Tricky concepts are spelled out clearly without talking down to the reader. But the book's strength lies in the contributions of Trut who gives deeply personal insights into the long-running project. Now in her 80s, she continues the experiments at the Russian Academy of Science.

A book like this could have easily told the story of the fox experiment then left it at that, but How to Tame a Fox is peppered with other evolutionary biology studies and poses questions that will stay with you long after you close the back cover. How can we get into an animal's mind? Why can't you domesticate a zebra? And the real head scratcher; are we just domesticated apes?

Robyn Williams: Well, I am, a naked ape. Bel Smith, ABC science unit, Melbourne. And the book won a major prize. Here's one of the authors Lee Dugatkin in Texas:

Lee Dugatkin: The American Association for the Advancement of Science Subaru Excellence in Science award.

Robyn Williams: Book of the year.

Lee Dugatkin: Book of the year.

Robyn Williams: Well done. Tell me, since you wrote the book, what has happened to that kind of research over there?

Lee Dugatkin: So the research is going on as it always has been. The book has definitely drawn a lot of attention from around the world, which is wonderful because one of the goals of this was to tell this incredible story to as many people as possible. But on a day to day basis Lyudmila and the whole team are out there continuing to do experiments on domestication in foxes, looking at everything from the molecular genetics to the sounds and vocalisations they make, to almost anything you could imagine.

Robyn Williams: How did you come to be involved yourself personally before you wrote the book?

Lee Dugatkin: I'm an evolutionary biologist and a historian of science, and I knew about this study. I also had the sense that there was a tremendous amount that folks did not know, and that a lot of it could only be gotten by working with Lyudmila and the whole team, a lot of the inside stories as well as a lot of help understanding the 95% of the work that is written in Russian.

Robyn Williams: How many generations does it take when you are selecting the foxes for nice behaviour, you know, the friendly ones, to get to something that is markedly different? Is it three, four, five, six generations, or what?

Lee Dugatkin: Well, it's definitely a continuum, and it happened faster than they thought it would. I would say that by 10 generations, which is 10 years, you're looking at something that is markedly and radically different from what you started with, both in terms of the way it acts much more friendly towards humans, and the way that it looks. And ever since the first 10 years, other things have been happening as well, but at the 10-year mark you would have known you had something different than what you started with.

Robyn Williams: Is it fair to say there is something called neoteny going on there, where you are selecting for juvenile behaviour that becomes maintained in the adult, so that you want to play, you want to be friendly, you want to be dog-like?

Lee Dugatkin: That is a large chunk of what's going on. Neoteny is really important, both, like you say, in terms of the behaviour but that also helps us understand some of the other characteristics that have appeared in these foxes, things like droopy ears. That's a trait you typically see in very, very young the foxes that goes away when they become adults, but because neoteny is so important behaviourally it seems that that has come along, it's genetically connected, and so when you select for juvenilisation you get that as well. So yes, a key part.

Robyn Williams: And what has happened as a result of the publication of your book to bring it to the wider audience? Have people become more aware of what they see every day, just their dog and where it comes from?

Lee Dugatkin: Well, that's certainly the reaction I get when I give this all over the country. When I give this talk and when people contact me they are always amazed at how much understanding the domestication of the fox can help them understand their own personal pet or just dog evolution and there is just this giant audience that are interested in dogs. And so that's absolutely one of the responses we get. In fact Lyudmila and I did a little article for…I can't remember which one it is now, but believe it or not there are a large number of dog magazines that have very, very wide circulations, and they love this, they just loved it because it helped explain dog evolution as well as fox evolution.

Robyn Williams: And can you do the same with foxes, turn them into domestic pets, and even dingoes?

Lee Dugatkin: Whether you could do that to dingoes I don't know. They've done it with foxes, they have also done it with minks. On the other side of the experimental farm where the foxes are they've done the same experiment with minks for 45 years. Generally the same results. You can get a really, really tame mink that looks dramatically different as well. They have also started an experiment that has been continued elsewhere with rats, domesticating rats and finding basically the same thing, sort of on a smaller scale but the same basic results.

Robyn Williams: My final question, are you continuing this sort of work in your own lab?

Lee Dugatkin: I continue it as the historian of science. So I don't have any foxes in my lab, I work with Lyudmila and the whole team to try and understand from a historical perspective in terms of putting the story out there. I wish I did have some foxes in my lab. Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Congratulations, wonderful work.

Lee Dugatkin: My pleasure, thank you so much.

Robyn Williams: Lee Dugatkin, receiving his AAAS award for book of the year, in Texas. And it's published by Chicago Press. How to Tame a Fox. But of course dogs evolved from wolves, so here's a final thought about their evolution as our first domestic companion way back. This is Professor Bob Wayne at UCLA on Skype from his home in Los Angeles.

Robyn Williams: But of course dogs evolved from wolves, so here's a final thought about their evolution as our first domestic companion way back. This is Professor Bob Wayne at UCLA on Skype from his home in Los Angeles.

The last time we had you on The Science Show we were talking about dogs being with people for something like 100,000 years. And of course this was a long time ago that we did this interview. What is your interpretation now of the time human beings and dogs, modern dogs, were together?

Robert Wayne: I think it's more on the level of 25,000 to maybe 40,000 years ago. You know, back then we were just using one kind of gene essentially, one marker, mitochondrial DNA, it's inherited as a unit. Now we can use complete genome sequences which involves thousands of genes, and so we can get much more confidence in the estimates that we make. Also ancient DNA methods have improved, so we now have direct estimates from the fossil record over time. But it turns out that the basic idea that dog domestication is very old, far older than any other domestication event, that's the main point, it must have occurred under conditions which are very different than that associated with agriculture.

Robyn Williams: And the interesting thing is it nonetheless goes further back than most of the dates you get from fossil excavation, from the archaeology, if you like.

Robert Wayne: But remember, even the first fossil record is not the first domestication event, it's just the first record, and the actual domestication event must proceed that by some period of time. The first dogs looked like wolves, so what you might be thinking are wolves are really domesticated or on the road to domestication. So it's very hard to say, at least from the fossil record, when the first wolves took on the habit of accompanying humans.

Robyn Williams: Yes, it's most impressive in fact, and there's no question…people do not argue that this is the oldest relationship that we have with another creature, but have you been able to show which of the wolves those dogs descended from? Is it modern wolves as you see them now or other sorts of wolves?

Robert Wayne: The direct ancestor of dogs, the wolf ancestor, was a Pleistocene wolf that no longer exists, it actually went extinct. And the closest group to dogs is still living grey wolves, but its direct ancestors have disappeared, and I think most of us feel pretty certain about that. And it appears that the wolf population crashed, leaving perhaps one population maybe in Siberia that is most directly ancestral to domestic dogs. But that population didn't leave any living descendants aside from domestic dogs, just like dinosaurs didn't leave any living descendants aside from birds. The amount of genetic diversity within dogs is not consistent with a single wolf or a few wolves even. The creation of things like the MHC, the Major Histocompatibility Complex, but also in turn the level of diversity in dogs is just too high to come from a very small founder population.

There is an additional complexity there that, once domesticated, dogs continued to exchange genes with wild wolves. So their diversity is enriched both by admixture that probably was taking place throughout domestication and into the present day, and the fact that the initial founding populations were fairly large.

Robyn Williams: It wasn't until we built fences and had 10,000 years ago cities and farms and suchlike that we could keep our animals away from the wild sort.

Robert Wayne: Yes, even then. We weren't keeping them on a leash mostly, even though there is some new evidence that suggests that Egyptians kept dogs on a leash. For much of domestication history, dogs are largely freeroaming and in loose association with humans, as they are in much of the world today.

Robyn Williams: Yes, the ancient Egyptians had their dogs on leads. Bob Wayne of UCLA, who has led the investigations of the dog genes and evolution from wolves for many years. He was on Skype from his home in Los Angeles.

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