Dogs are selectively bred from wolves, so could a Pomeranian, for example, be bred to be like a wolf?
Herman D鈥橦ondt
Advertisement
Mascot, New South Wales, Australia
I can think of two methods to attempt this, though both will only take us part of the way.
First, we could let dogs run wild. As they learn to survive, over the generations, they will lose their domestic traits and revert to being wild animals. However, there is no guarantee the resulting creatures will look like wolves.
This is clear with the dingo, a domesticated dog that reverted to living in the wild thousands of years ago. It doesn鈥檛 look anything like a wolf. Remember that, due to the unpredictability of mutations, evolution won鈥檛 run in reverse.
The second method is to breed dogs in captivity. In that case, it is certainly possible to produce a dog that looks like a wolf.
The German Shepherd already looks quite similar to a wolf and I am sure that similarity could be improved. The problem is that, even looking like a wolf, such an animal would still be a dog in the way it behaves. It would still be friendly to people and wouldn鈥檛 exhibit the hunting behaviour characteristic of wolves.
To fix that, we could try a reversal of the experiment started by Dmitry Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, in the 1950s, which aimed to breed tame silver foxes.
To do this, we could select those dogs that exhibit a fear of humans and that like to hunt. This might be a partial solution, but the only way to recreate the pack-hunting behaviour of wolves would be to let the dogs roam free and evolve naturally.
Of course, there would still be no guarantee they would start to hunt like wolves 鈥� after thousands of years, dingoes still don鈥檛.
Mike Follows
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK
Dogs and wolves can produce fertile offspring called 鈥渨olfdogs鈥�. By one definition, this means that they belong to the same species. The dog (Canis lupus familiaris) is simply a sub-species of the grey wolf (Canis lupus).
Tens of thousands of years ago, it is thought that hungry wolves scavenged on the food our hunter-gatherer ancestors threw away. The aggressive ones were driven out or killed, leaving friendlier wolves closer to our settlements, where they may have warned of predators 鈥� and so the process of domestication began.
Given the differences in appearance and behaviour, it is sometimes difficult to believe that all dogs belong to the same species. In fact, all dogs have a virtually identical genome.
In the absence of artificial breeding, there would be less variation amongst dogs, as can be seen among feral street dogs, which are well adapted to their urban environment. If these dogs were dumped into the same habitat as wolves, they probably wouldn鈥檛 survive. However, if their habitat were changed gradually over many generations, then natural selection is likely to push them towards having more wolf-like characteristics.
However, gene editing may be required because the extreme sociability of dogs has been traced to structural changes in certain genes. Of course, this gene editing is nowhere near as ambitious as the 鈥淐hickenosaurus鈥� that palaeontologist Jack Horner wants to produce. Inspired by Michael Crichton鈥檚 book Jurassic Park and the movies that followed, Horner is trying to recreate a dinosaur from a chicken embryo by manipulating various genes.
To answer this question 鈥� or ask a new one 鈥� email lastword@newscientist.com.
Questions should be scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena, and both questions and answers should be concise. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Please include a postal address, daytime telephone number and email address.
麻豆传媒 retains total editorial control over the published content and reserves all rights to reuse question and answer material that has been submitted by readers in any medium or in any format.