Darwin’s Dark Knight: Scientist Risked Execution for Fox Study (Op-Ed)

Brian Hare is an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and the founder of Dognition, a website that helps you find the genius in your dog. This post was an adaptation from his book "The Genius of Dogs," co-authored with Vanessa Woods (Dutton, 2013). He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Credit: Brian Hare

Today (July 17) is the birthday of one of the most important scientists you've probably never heard of — Dmitri Konstantinovich Belyaev. In the chokehold of Stalin's Russia, where being a geneticist was likely to get you imprisoned, shot or both, Belyaev conducted perhaps the greatest genetics experiment of the 20th century and finally solved the puzzle of how the wolf turned into the dog. 

For almost a century, Darwin's biggest idea had a hole in it. To illustrate natural selection, Darwin did not directly suggest that humans shared a common ancestor with apes. Instead, he used a concept that everyone was familiar with — domestication. Everyone knew that you could selectively breed dogs for certain physical characteristics, like size or coat color. Darwin wanted to stretch this idea a little further and suggest that instead of a human hand, it was natural selection that drove evolution. 

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