I’ve felt that dogs have taken the same path. Notice how expressive their facial muscles are? Wolves don’t have nearly so many facial muscles. Wild to learn about isn’t it?!

I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention the six decade long silver fox domestication experiment:

https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x

They bred the tamest foxes from each generation and started seeing shortened snouts and floppy ears. Although there is some dispute about the initial population from a study in 2019. To my understanding the researchers with the dispute question the existence of domestication syndrome though, so the experiment would still align with the article. And I think there is some dispute over the neural crest cell explanation mentioned in the article too.

If it was not noticeably cuter, then it would cause no advantage and the theory falls. (Which is possible, of course.)

We are more hostile to ugly raccoons and more often helpful to cute ones. This isn’t evolution, it’s selective extinction based on cuteness, would be my guess. One example of the power humans have in shaping the natural world around what our emotions tell us to.

Wow that’s interesting!

The study lays out the case that the domestication process is often wrongly thought of as initiated by humans—with people capturing and selectively breeding wild animals. But the study authors claim that the process begins much earlier, when animals become habituated to human environments.

“One thing about us humans is that, wherever we go, we produce a lot of trash,” says the study’s co-author and University of Arkansas at Little Rock biologist Raffaela Lesch. Piles of human scraps offer a bottomless buffet to wildlife, and to access that bounty, animals need to be bold enough to rummage through human rubbish but not so bold as to become a threat to people.

This has absolutely blown my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever considered that, obviously.

We are more hostile to ugly raccoons and more often helpful to cute ones. This isn’t evolution, it’s selective extinction based on cuteness, would be my guess. One example of the power humans have in shaping the natural world around what our emotions tell us to.

You assume it’s a one-way street.

Humans having a proclivity towards “cute” animals is as much an evolved trait as animals becoming “cuter” to better adapt to presence.

Hell, for that matter, it isn’t just us that have a proclivity towards “cuteness”. It exists in plenty of species, we just tend to be the ones most prone to it outside of very similar species.

It is absolutely evolution because it isn’t selective.

We are more hostile to ugly raccoons and more often helpful to cute ones. This isn’t evolution, it’s selective extinction based on cuteness, would be my guess. One example of the power humans have in shaping the natural world around what our emotions tell us to.

Wolves also do not understand pointing, most other human gestures and they can not read human emotions through our faces. Dogs can understand all that. Humans and dogs have co-evolved for such a long time that our species now have a deep instinctual understanding of each other.

I think the hangup is thinking evolution can’t proceed quickly. We were taught in school that evolution take millions of years and we resist the idea that it can move quickly.

We’ve been figuring out over the last two decades that evolution can move fast, given enough selective pressure.

Arguing with a reasonalbe Christian on reddit 10-years back; Said African elephants were growing smaller, or no tusks, in response to poaching. He called it “breeding”. I call it hella selective pressure. Same difference?

i think also the concept of “survival of the fittest” was like an alpha thing; who fought nature and won. versus fittest being more about fitting into the environment better. the best fit for the specific environment.

The example of elephants producing less ivory for us to poach is unintentional selective breeding, yeah. Evolution works way faster when directed by an intelligence than when it’s left up to a relatively stable environment, simply because we exert more pressure for change.