• Question: Assume humans are immortal, if we could control every detail detail about a wolfs surroundings, for example its prey, temperature, air pressure ect. Do you think that we could control their evolution and make them intelligent like us?

    Asked by Julius Caesar to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      This is probably my very very favourite subject besides what I am doing and is SUPER interesting!

      There is a man who has tried this with Foxes and wolves for the last 70 years and has got wild foxes and bred them and controlled how much they see humans and what they eat and their environments exactly like you were talking about!

      In fact his experiments are still going on today even though he died because people are carrying it on.

      They found some really really interesting results!

      The foxes that are fed food similar to dogs and who see humans loads have some really interesting changes. All of their babies and their grandchildren have really floppy ears and big wiggly tails and start looking like a dog that we would recognise just by being around humans and not having to hunt for themselves or look out for animals that might hurt them and their fur becomes softer because they are getting good food all year round and don’t need a thick winter coat!

      There’s some REALLY cute videos of this on youtube I can find for you if you want to see it!

    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Environment plays a huge part in evolution.

      All animals (and plants) have features that allow them to adapt to their environment. The organisms in a community compete with each other for limited resources, including water and space. Animals thus adapt to their environments, adaptations that are passed on via mutations to later generations.

      So in your wolf example, there is no doubt that over many many many years of conditioning, through generations of wolves, that their evolution could be controlled to have them become significantly more adapted to increase their intelligence – perhaps not to human levels, but closer nonetheless!

    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      I think that although we change the wolves a lot (just look at all of the different types of dogs!) to make them intelligent it would be much easier to genetically modify them. We already know some genes that help us communicate (like FoxP3) so maybe we could put the human forms into wolves and see what happens? It would be a lot quicker than evolution by chance!

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