Researching Evolution, She Bred Foxes Into Pets

"How, exactly, did the wolves lurking around ancient humans' campfires turn into the pugs and cockapoos that sleep in our beds?

For 66 years, Lyudmila Trut worked to find out. On a remote fox farm in Siberia, the Russian evolutionary geneticist ran an extraordinary science experiment to uncover the process by which something wild changes into something docile.

Trut, who died Oct. 9 at age 90, devoted her career to squeezing the millennia-long process of domestication into a single lifetime -- Trut's lifetime -- so that it could be methodically observed.

Lyudmila Nikolaevna Trut was born Nov. 6, 1933, just outside Moscow and grew up amid the hardships of World War II. Even so, she recalled, her mother preserved small amounts of their food rations to feed stray dogs.

In 1958, after studying animal physiology at Moscow State University, Trut met Dmitri K. Belyaev, an accomplished scientist who was about to become director of Russia's Institute of Cytology and Genetics. He was hatching an odd and ambitious plan. "He told me that he wanted to make a dog out of a fox," Trut wrote in "How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog)," a 2017 book co-written with Lee Alan Dugatkin.

Belyaev's hypothesis was that a suite of physical traits common in domesticated species but not in their wild counterparts -- including curly or wavy hair, coiled tails and floppy ears -- had basically hitchhiked along genetically as humans bred those species to be tame. In short, our ancestors wanted to make an animal that behaved a certain way but wound up with one that looked a certain way, too.

Belyaev would test this hypothesis by simulating the long process of domestication with silver foxes, close relatives of wolves that he had access to because he was researching how they could produce better fur coats, a lucrative export for the Soviet government.

It was an unprecedented undertaking that he wanted Trut to run. It was also dangerous. Genetics had been denounced in the Soviet Union under Stalin as a destructive, Western pseudoscience. Many geneticists, including Belyaev's older brother, had been sent to die in labor camps or murdered.

Even several years after Stalin's death, Belyaev was compelled to disguise the purpose of his project as a physiology study aligned with his official research. Trut, grasping how important the work could be, was undaunted by the risk.

She had spent her whole life in or around Moscow at that point and only recently married Vladimir Trut, an aviation mechanic, and had a newborn baby girl. (Vladimir died in 2007; their daughter, Marina Diyomina, survives Trut.) Nevertheless, that spring, the family of three, along with Trut's mother, relocated to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, where winter temperatures routinely reach minus-30 Fahrenheit.

Trut toured remote fur farms, gathering up 130 of the most docile foxes she could find. She sorted them for tameness after assessing their temperaments. (The technique involved reaching into the fox cages while wearing a 2-inch-thick protective glove and gauging how eager each animal was to chew off her fingers.) She bred the very tamest foxes together, then bred the tamest of their offspring together -- and on and on, aggressively streamlining and accelerating a process that would have unfolded more haphazardly in prehistoric times.

By the fourth generation, several pups shocked Trut by wagging their tail when she approached. Two generations later, the young animals "eagerly sought contacts with [humans], not only wagging, also whining, whimpering, and licking in a dog-like manner," Trut wrote in a 2009 paper.

Meanwhile, physical changes were also taking hold: The foxes' snouts gradually became rounder and shorter, their ears turned floppy and their tails curled, mirroring the metamorphosis of wolves into dogs. Trut and colleagues also tracked shifts in the animals' hormone levels and neurochemistry. Trut earned a Ph.D. in genetics while she ran the project and taught herself to surgically transplant embryos from tame fox mothers into aggressive ones, to show that the behavioral changes were a function of nature, not nurture.

By the 15th generation of foxes, so many animals seemed puppylike that Trut wondered about living with one as a pet. "And so," she later wrote with Dugatkin in Scientific American, "on March 28, 1974, Pushinka, Russian for 'tiny ball of fuzz,' and I moved in together." In a small house on the farm, the fox "would lie by my feet and wait for me to scratch her neck. If I popped out of the house for a bit, Pushinka would sometimes sit at the window, looking out in anticipation of my return." At night, Pushinka leapt into Trut's bed to snuggle. A few years later, one of Trut's employees took a fox named Coca home temporarily, and she and her husband taught it to return to them when they whistled.

Trut habitually gave Belyaev, who had envisioned the study, all the credit. But Dugatkin, Trut's co-author, noted that she had been running the experiment for many years by the time her boss died in 1985, and its leadership officially passed to her.

In addition to being an exacting and intuitively talented scientist, Dugatkin said, Trut had a gift for getting things done. "She was tough as nails," he said -- a barely-five-foot-tall woman who, on Dugatkin's first visit to the farm, thought nothing of trudging through more than two feet of snow to show him around.

Along with the lovable foxes, Trut bred a second, parallel population of foxes at the farm selected for aggressiveness: a horde of unruly, nasty animals as demonic as the others were cuddly and sweet. Journalists who visited the operation often described walking over to this other barn like a descent into the underworld. ("I still have nightmares," Dugatkin said.)

In a 2010 documentary, "Dogs Decoded," Trut shows off these malevolent foxes. As she walks down the rows of pens, the animals all bark at her and lunge forward recklessly, slamming their bodies into the metal bars.

Somehow, Trut gets bitten. "I didn't even open the cage," she tells the camera through an interpreter. "I just put my hand up, and it managed to bite me through the bars!" She's smiling -- intrigued, even impressed, by what these creatures are capable of. Then, wrapping her wound in a bandage, she continues the tour." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Obituaries: Researching Evolution, She Bred Foxes Into Pets --- The Russian geneticist helped show that choosing the tamest wild animals to reproduce, generation after generation, can produce domesticated animals within a human lifetime. Mooallem, Jon.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Nov 2024: C.6.

 

Lietuvių svajonės praturtėti iš mirties baigiasi: Europos mirties pardavėjus gąsdina Trumpas --- Europos gynybos akcijos patiria spaudimą nuo Trumpo planų

 Labanakt, Rheinmetall.

 

 „Anot analitikų, Donaldo Trumpo planai pradėti vyriausybės efektyvumą, kai jis pradės eiti pareigas, didina neapibrėžtumą Europos gynybos įmonėms, kurios priklauso nuo JAV finansavimo.

 

 Išrinktasis JAV prezidentas paprašė Elono Musko, „Tesla“ ir „SpaceX“ vykdomojo direktoriaus, ir Viveko Ramaswamy, biotechnologijų verslininko, kandidatavusio į JAV prezidentus, vykdyti pastangas, kurias Muskas pavadino Vyriausybės efektyvumo departamentu.

 

 „Bank of America Securities“ analitikai teigė, kad šis žingsnis apsunkina Europos gynybos kompanijų, kurios labai priklauso nuo JAV kontraktų, tokių, kaip, Londone listinguojamos, BAE Systems ir QinetiQ, vertinimus.

 

 Penktadienį „BofA Securities“ sumažino abiejų kompanijų reitingą iki prastesnio nuo neutralaus, motyvuodama „augančiu netikrumu“ dėl JAV gynybos biudžeto, kurį sukėlė DOGE planai.

 

 Europos gynybos akcijos vertinamos aukštai nuo 2022 m. vasario mėn. įvykių Ukrainoje, todėl jų reitingai gali sumažėti, jei sumažėtų gynybos biudžetas.

 

 „Manome, kad DOGE ir dėmesys biudžeto efektyvumui padidina neapibrėžtumą, kuris gali turėti įtakos vertinimui“, – sakė analitikai. „DOGE gali pakeisti sutartį, bet taip pat gali ir ne“.

 

 Praėjusiais metais „BAE Systems“ pardavimai JAV sudarė 42% – tai didžiausia jos rinka, lenkianti JK ir Saudo Arabiją. „QinetiQ“ atveju JAV atiteko 21% pajamų 2024 m.

 

 Mariana Perez, JAV aviacijos ir gynybos analitikė iš „BofA Securities“, teigė, kad gynyba dažniausiai yra dėmesio centre, kai vyriausybės išlaidos patiria spaudimą, nes gynybos išlaidos yra labiau diskrecinės, nei civilinės.

 

 Praėjusią savaitę Goldman Sachs analitikas Nojus Poponakas perspėjo, kad JAV išlaidos gynybai vyksta dešimtmečių ciklais ir šalis gali artėti prie dabartinio ciklo piko.

 

 „Gynybos biudžetas dabar yra aukščiausias visų laikų skaičius, o tai sukuria sudėtingus palyginimus ir sudėtingus bazinius efektus“, - sakė Poponakas. „Sunku imtis didelių vyriausybės išlaidų mažinimo pastangų, nepaliečiant gynybos, o gynybos biudžete gali būti pakankamai neefektyvumo, kad būtų sumažintas bendras jo lygis, nebūtinai sumažinant karinį pasirengimą ar pajėgumus."

 

 Tačiau didėjanti geopolitinė įtampa su Rusija ir Kinija ir toliau palaiko logiką modernizuoti Vakarų armijas ir investuoti į technologinius atnaujinimus gynybos tikslais, pažymėjo Perezas.

 

 Apskritai Trumpo grįžimas į Baltuosius rūmus vertinamas. kaip teigiamas Europos gynybos kompanijoms, nes tikimasi, kad išrinktasis prezidentas darys spaudimą likusioms NATO narėms padidinti jų nacionalinį gynybos biudžetą, viršijantį dabartinį įsipareigojimą išleisti bent 2 proc. jų bendrojo vidaus produkto kasmet.

 

 Tačiau, anot „BofA Securities“ analitikų, vidutiniu laikotarpiu JK ir JAV, greičiausiai, padidins išlaidas gynybai mažesniu tempu, nei Europos sąjungininkės, tokios, kaip Vokietija, Prancūzija, Italija ar Rytų Europa.

 

 Tai daro spaudimą tokioms įmonėms, kaip „QinetiQ“, kuri savo pajamas gauna iš Didžiosios Britanijos, JAV ir Australijos, o žemyninėje Europoje turi mažiau galimybių, teigia analitikai.

 

 „Nors mes netikime, kad tai kelia pavojų QinetiQ vidutinio laikotarpio augimo gairėms, mes tikime, kad tai išryškina mažiau palankią gynybai ekosistemą“, – pridūrė jie.

 

 Penktadienio prekyboje Londone BAE akcijos atpigo 4,9% iki 12,27 svaro, o QinetiQ akcijos atpigo 3,5% iki 4,15 svaro. Per metus akcijos pabrango atitinkamai 10,49% ir 34,37%.

 

 BAE iš karto nebuvo galimybių komentuoti, o QinetiQ atsisakė komentuoti." [1]

 

Europos Sąjunga bankrutuoja klasišku metodu: dabar, iš pradžių, palaipsniui (žiūrėk Prancūziją ir Vokietiją), po to staiga. Todėl čia pinigėlių lietaus irgi nebus.

1. EXCHANGE --- European Defense Stocks Face Pressure Amid Trump Plans. Gallardo, Cristina.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Nov 2024: B.10.

The End of Lithuanian Dream to Get Rich from the Death: European Sellers of Death Are Scared by Trump --- European Defense Stocks Face Pressure Amid Trump Plans

Good night, Rheinmetall. 

"Donald Trump's plans to launch a government-efficiency push when he takes office are boosting uncertainty for European defense companies reliant on U.S. funding, according to analysts.

The U.S. president-elect has asked Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla and SpaceX, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who ran for U.S. president, to run the effort Musk has dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency.

The move is weighing on valuations of European defense companies that rely heavily on U.S. contracts, such as the London-listed BAE Systems and QinetiQ, analysts from Bank of America Securities said.

On Friday, BofA Securities cut its rating of both companies to underperform from neutral, citing the "growing uncertainty" over the U.S. defense budget brought about by the DOGE plans.

European defense stocks are trading at high valuations since events in Ukraine in February 2022, leaving them vulnerable to a rating cut if defense budgets fall.

"We believe DOGE and the focus on budget efficiency adds uncertainty which could weigh on valuation," the analysts said. "DOGE could result in contract changes, but it also may not."

BAE Systems made 42% of sales in the U.S. last year, its biggest market ahead of the U.K. and Saudi Arabia. In the case of QinetiQ, the U.S. accounted for the 21% of revenue in fiscal 2024.

Mariana Perez, a U.S. aerospace and defense analyst at BofA Securities, said defense is usually in the spotlight when government spending is under pressure because defense spending is more discretionary than civilian spending.

Last week, Goldman Sachs analyst Noah Poponak warned that U.S. defense spending runs in decadeslong cycles and the country may be nearing the peak of the current cycle.

"The defense budget is at an all-time high, which creates difficult comparisons and challenging base effects," Poponak said. "It is difficult to embark on any large government spending reduction effort without touching defense, and there are potentially enough inefficiencies within the defense budget to reduce its total level without necessarily reducing military readiness or capability."

However, rising geopolitical tensions with Russia and China continue to support the rationale to modernize Western armies and invest in technological upgrades for defense purposes, Perez noted.

Overall, Trump's return to the White House is seen as positive for European defense companies, as the president-elect is expected to put pressure on the rest of NATO members to boost their national defense budgets above their current commitment to spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product annually.

But according to the BofA Securities analysts, in the midterm, the U.K. and the U.S. will likely increase their defense spending at a lower rate than European allies such as Germany, France, Italy or Eastern Europe.

This puts pressure on companies such as QinetiQ, which generates its revenue from Britain, the U.S. and Australia, and has less exposure to continental Europe, the analysts said.

"While we don't believe that this puts QinetiQ's midterm growth guidance at risk, we do believe that it highlights a less favourable ecosystem for defense," they added.

BAE shares were down 4.9% in Friday trading in London, at 12.27 pounds, while QinetiQ's shares declined 3.5% to 4.15 pounds. The stocks are up 10.49% and 34.37% year-to-date, respectively.

BAE wasn't immediately available for comment, while QinetiQ declined to comment." [1]

The European Union is going bankrupt in the classic way: now, at first, gradually (look at France and Germany), then suddenly. Therefore, there will be no money rain here either.

1. EXCHANGE --- European Defense Stocks Face Pressure Amid Trump Plans. Gallardo, Cristina.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Nov 2024: B.10.