SciShow and Hank Green are thinking about domestication

I promised a brief evergreeen educational entry today, so I'm examining three videos on a common theme from SciShow and Hank Green, beginning with Something Strange Is Happening to Raccoons.

You might have heard about a viral study claiming raccoons are domesticating themselves. There's a lot more to the story, though, and it might help us understand what domestication is in the first place.

Raccoons are just taking the first step to being domesticated, which is increased tolerance for humans. That's advantageous to them as wild animals living in urban and suburban areas. They're not alone in adapting to people; "birds change the pitch of their songs [and] city mice have larger brains than country mice" as I first noted nine years ago. Just the same, maybe people, beginning with North Americans, will have raccoons as pets in future centuries. Not now, the raccoons aren't ready.

The above video came a week after Humans Didn't Make Dogs Weird.

Conventional wisdom holds that the huge variety of dogs is just the result of humans breeding them to be that way. But new research suggests that dogs have been weird from the start.

Both natural and artificial selection have to work on pre-existing material. One can't just will a trait from nothing. Even transgenic organisms, like Colossal Bioscience's dire wolves, have to get their traits from somewhere, such as DNA from subfossil remains. Dogs are only so morphologically diverse now because they were already morphologically diverse in the past.

Speaking of dogs, Hank Green, who runs the studio that produces SciShow (also Bizarre Beasts and PBS Eons) uploaded The Weirdest Thing About Dogs (and Cats (and Horses)).

Hank Green explores the evolutionary history behind the unique facial muscles that allow dogs to communicate so expressively with humans. This examination considers how various domestic animals have developed specialized traits to better convey their internal states and bond with their human companions.

Yeah, that's an AI summary, but it works better than the video description Hank wrote. Some of the traits of domesticated mammals are ones that evolved for the benefit of the animal, not bred into it purely for the benefit of humans. This is especially true of dogs' eyebrows, which we like, but which help the dog. This shows our relationship is a mutualism.

I'm lecturing about evolution in my biodiversity class, so I might be able to use one of these videos. Even if I don't, I plan on incorporating the information from them next week. Welcome to blogging as professional development.

That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature.