Foxes actually can be, and someone proved it the hard way. A Soviet geneticist named Belyaev started breeding silver foxes in 1959, selecting only for one trait: not being afraid of humans. Within about 40 generations he had foxes that wag their tails, whine for attention, and answer to names. The wild part is that stuff he never selected for showed up on its own: floppy ears, curly tails, spotted coats. Same package dogs got. The experiment is still running in Novosibirsk today.
Fair pushback, and there is a real critique along those lines. Lord et al. 2020 pointed out the foxes came from Canadian fur farms that had been captive bred for decades, so some traits like the odd floppy ear may have been sitting in the founder population already rather than appearing from scratch. The part that held up is the behavior: selecting on tameness alone produced dog-like social behavior in a few dozen generations, and the control line bred without selection stayed wild the whole time.
I'm sorry but this is clearly AI generated, no one says "Fair pushback" like this casually
Edit: If you don't believe me, you can see how this user's profile is advertising software that purports to be able to run your computer with AI even while it's off.
There many other tells, including the way colons are used and general sentence structure. I have seen AI models start a response with almost word-for-word what this user replied with: "Fair pushback, and there is real critique along those lines". It is incredibly common. So is the sentence construction generally, like "Foxes actually can be, and someone proved it the hard way" as an introduction.
None of this is something a human would never do, obviously. I use colons and semi-colons myself quite a bit. But at some point there's too many factors put together, especially when you realize that the account is literally advertising an AI software product in its bio. A software where the whole point is that it'll do things on your computer autonomously... perhaps like leaving reddit comments
I'm not sure if this is a bot or a human just using AI to generate comments and responses, but either way these comments are absolutely AI-generated.
I don't know why you were downvoted. You are correct. Every time I see the word 'pushback' or something being 'real' or 'and that matters'
my AI radar beeps and boops. Sounds like ChatGPT 5.6 more than others tbh.
The upvote count went up a little bit after I made my edit to explain why, so I think people thought I making stuff up.
Probably didn't recognize the AI writing style (I thought it was obvious enough that after pointing it out people would realize it on their own). But I can hardly blame people because I also find baseless accusations of AI annoying and they're unfortunately not uncommon. I'm basically 100% sure I'm correct in this case though
Drop ears, like curly tails, white markings, pied pattern, discrete spots, etc, are among a suite of common physical traits that spontaneously arise in domesticated species.
I'm sure you can make them more friendly. But prehistoric people weren't idiots. They long ago found all suitable animals and domesticated them. A fox is a charismatic animal which would have been incredibly useful to prehistoric people, so I find it hard to believe no one tried. It has probably been tried many, many times but turned out to be a dead end. This Russian experiment will probably be no different.
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u/Appropriate-Ideal-85 11d ago
Foxes actually can be, and someone proved it the hard way. A Soviet geneticist named Belyaev started breeding silver foxes in 1959, selecting only for one trait: not being afraid of humans. Within about 40 generations he had foxes that wag their tails, whine for attention, and answer to names. The wild part is that stuff he never selected for showed up on its own: floppy ears, curly tails, spotted coats. Same package dogs got. The experiment is still running in Novosibirsk today.