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.

City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout—a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals

I wonder if it’s softer food.

For the new study, she and 16 graduate and undergraduate students gathered nearly 20,000 photographs of raccoons across the contiguous U.S. from the community science platform iNaturalist. The team found that raccoons in urban environments had a snout that was 3.5 percent shorter than that of their rural cousins.

Or maybe people in cities take more photos of “cuter” animals?

I don’t think someone would notice a 3.5% shorter snout when they took the picture.

Not individually, but over nearly 20,000 instances.

If humans are more likely to take photos of racoons they find cute, we’d expect those racoons to have cuter features than the average racoon. It might not be actual change going on, is the point being made.

We don’t conciously notice the snout length, just the ones we think are cute are probably slightly more likely to have a shorter snout.

If they’re iNaturalist photo submissions then they’re submitting every raccoon (and other animal) they see

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.

I’m curious: what do you think evolution is?

You could argue whether or not it’s “natural” selection but it’s still evolution.

Nah, when animals go from feeding themselves to being fed by humans and from living in wild habitats to human environments, their bodies do not need the adaptations they had, and instead are pressured towards new ones that are similar to our pets because they experience similar evolutionary pressures as our pets.

Raccoons are simply going thorough the same changes that our pets already went through when they were domesticated. It’s not that raccoons are looking more like our pets, it’s that both raccoons and our pets are looking less like themselves and more like “domesticated”, and our pets are further ahead on this transition.

I mean every raccoon in the study was photographed. So this wouldn’t explain any difference within that sample.

it’s selective extinction based on…

As long as whatever trait it’s based on is heritable, that’s evolution.

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’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?!

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.

Yeah, if you ever run across the theories of how dogs became so close to us, it started with wolves being willing to take the risks of scavenging near us, and eventually co-evolving (until selective breeding started).

Actively, intentionally domesticating a species is a slow process overall, and it wasn’t something that I’ve seen any specialists suggest would have been the case with dogs, or cats.

My point is that the change in length is only 3.5%, not more than someone would notice when deciding to taking a photo.

The 3.5% change in snout length is one sign of domestication starting to happen, not a sign that people will be more likely to take a photo—that idea was just the speculation of a commenter.

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