Breeding for aggression

摘要

This hy peraggressive rat is a legacy of a remarkable experiment started in the former Soviet Union in 1972 by Dmitry Belyaev. Like Charles Darwin before him, he was interested in the process of domestication. But while Darwin thought the process must be "insensibly slow", Belyaev suspected otherwise. He caught wild ratsaround the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and selectively bred two colonies on a farm a few kilometres away, hoping to mimic the process by which Neolithicfarmers first domesticated animals.