What is interesting is it is happening with urban racoons too. I'm not sure what the selective pressure might be for smaller snouts. I don't think racoons are being killed like a dangerous bear might. I'd assume if any are being actively fed for looking cute it is very few of them, and those doing the feeding wouldn't be selective about it.

My best guess is that the short snout trait is in linkage with something else that is actually what is being selected upon. At least for racoons.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-show...

same with russian fox fur breeders. i don't remember the numbers, but after a surprisingly small number of generations the foxes turned into cat-like pets.

What portion of lab mice are from genetically stable inbred lines? I assumed most of them were from those lines due to their predictable characteristics. C57BL/6 being predictably kind of bitey for example

I heard the same process has been running on humans for the last few millennia. Apparently 2% of the population was executed every year, wherein presumably the most aggressive and independently-minded individuals are overrepresented.

Something something autodomestication...

Do lab mice breed after selection for experiments?

or worse, till we breed softer claws, speaking with their hands

Coyotes are on their way too

Evolution works in bursts. Species can stay stable for millions of years and then evolve in relative blink of an eye when the environment changes.

Right, how do you know the gene pool now mostly contains large aggressive bears that instinctively stay away from villages, and small cuddly bears that are enjoying left over pasta suppers ?

Maybe it's just that many of the large aggressive bears living near villages have just been shot or scared away, but the genetics is unchanged and the offspring of large aggressive bears currently living away from villages will have no aversion to trying their luck in the village ?

Not really?

If there's a range of "how aggressive a bear can be", and it's mostly driven by genetics, and aggression is heavily selected against in the environment? Then you can get a considerable reduction in aggression in the span of as little as a few generations. Bear generation time is what, 5 years? They coexisted with humans for a long time now.

Now, traits with weaker genetic components (i.e. if bear aggression is only 50% genetic) can take much longer. Even more so for traits with low variance, or highly complex traits and behaviors. But evolution isn't always slow. Certain changes can happen quickly - about as quickly as you can apply the selection pressure.

Some Russians have been trying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM0GEN_CNfI

that'd be a nice monthly food bill, a black bear can eat 20x as much as a dog

The coon's too: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-show...

I’m all for analysis of, and challenges to, research studies. If we don’t have that we can’t do science. But I don’t like sneering, knee jerk statements like ourmandave’s Yeah, this seems related to the "raccoons becoming domesticated" bullsht.*

I watched the video ourmandave pointed us to where NessieExplains points out what she says are flaws in the study suggesting raccoons are becoming domesticated:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12983-025-00583-1

The data set and the code used to analyze the data are at https://osf.io/56xcg/overview.

Her criticisms and conclusions may well be correct, but her video is really just her saying her conclusions are correct. She downloaded the data and did her own analysis and points to results in her spreadsheets. It all flies by quite quickly. We have to take her word for it. She also made a snarky comment about this line in the R code:

  # 57% Let’s see what we can do to change that!

  # what if we remove those pictures that we had issues measuring?
  # that would be gbifIDs: 4855527033, 4096474261, 2311326414, 4528316516
  # Vector of IDs to exclude - the image quality was too bad after all
  ids_to_exclude <- c(4855527033, 4096474261, 4528316516, 2311326414)

She says in the video that she’s an actual raccoon biologist. According to her web site she is pursuing a master’s in biology (nessieexplains.com/about-nessie-explains/) although there is no date on the page, so she may have completed the degree already.

As I say, she may well be correct, but I have no way of knowing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanthrope

https://nhmu.utah.edu/articles/animals-who-have-adapted-live...

We already did. Most of us, anyway. Unfortunately it only takes a few percent to spoil it for all the rest.

For what it’s worth, I think even the worst outcomes wouldn’t necessarily force us to extinction. Would be a bit of a reset though.

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