It was 1959, and Dmitry Belyayev had a plan. He was going to take the silver fox – a wild animal prized for its fur but naturally (and understandably) hostile to humans – and domesticate it. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Critics called the plan overambitious. “The audacity […] is difficult to overestimate,” wrote Tecumseh Fitch, an animal behavior expert now at the University of Vienna, after a 2002 visit to Belyayev’s lab . “The selection process on dogs, horses, cattle or other species had occurred, mostly unconsciously, over thousands of years, and the idea that Belyaev’s experiment might succeed in a human lifetime must have seemed bold indeed.”

Nevertheless, it worked – both far better, and far faster, than an

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