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Dmitri Belyaev was a Russian geneticist who served as director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1959 to 1985.
His decades-long effort to breed domesticated foxes has been described by the New York Times as "arguably the most extraordinary breeding experiment ever conducted." A 2010 article in Scientific American stated that Belyaev "may be the man most responsible for our understanding of the process by which wolves were domesticated into our canine companions."
Beginning in the 1950s, in order to uncover the genetic basis of the distinctive behavioral and physiological attributes of domesticated animals, Belyaev and his team spent decades breeding the wild silver fox and selecting for reproduction only those individuals in each generation that showed the least fear of humans. After several generations of controlled breeding, a majority of the silver foxes no longer showed any fear of humans and often wagged their tails and licked their human caretakers to show affection. They also began to display spotted coats, floppy ears, curled tails, as well as other physical attributes often found in domesticated animals, thus confirming Belyaev’s hypothesis that both the behavioral and physical traits of domesticated animals could be traced to “a collection of genes that conferred a propensity to tameness—a genotype that the foxes perhaps shared with any species that could be domesticated."
Belyaev, who especially during the early years of his experiment was risking his life by defying the anti-Darwinian, anti-Mendelian Soviet scientific establishment, has been recognized in recent years by major scientific journals as a pioneering figure in modern genetics.
At the time Belyaev came of age, however, life was dangerous in the Soviet Union for genetics with such views, because the Stalinist regime supported the scientific theories of agronomist Trofim Lysenko and outlawed research inspired by the rival views of Gregor Mendel. [...] "genetics was considered fake science." Indeed, under the rule of Stalin, leading geneticists who believed in Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics were considered enemies of the state. Several of them were sent to prison, and at least one, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, was sentenced to death. Nikolai Belyaev [his brother] was arrested in August 1937, and was executed without a trial on November 10 of that year.
The experiment began in 1959, at a time "when Soviet genetics was starting to recover from the anti-Darwinian ideology of Trofim Lysenko." Still, in order to avoid interference by the authorities, Belyaev continued to frame his research "only in terms of physiology, leaving out any mention of genes." [...]" when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev arrived to inspect the institute, he was overheard to say, 'What, are those geneticists still around? Were they not destroyed?'" Wikipedia