Usarian

@SNealiam @histories_arch You're personifying DNA. It doesn't "see" or detect anything in any way. Natural selection is simply survival of the individuals fittest for the conditions. Researchers caused to survive & reproduce the exact opposite. The physical changes are merely coincidental

@histories_arch It's very direct, these creatures swap from pure competition to high cooperation environments, DNA sees less danger in the new environment. This allows the DNA upon its next recombination to focus on traits like cuteness that increase kindness cooperation from others.

In 1959, Soviet geneticist Dmitry Belyaev launched what The New York Times would later call arguably the most extraordinary breeding experiment ever conducted. But to understand why he did it, you need to know what happened 22 years earlier. In August 1937, Belyaev's older brother Nikolai, a prominent geneticist who worked on population genetics, was arrested by Stalin's secret police. On November 10, he was executed without trial. His wife and child vanished. Nikolai's crime was practicing Mendelian genetics, the foundational science of heredity that explained how traits pass from parents to offspring through genes. Under Stalin, a charlatan agronomist named Trofim Lysenko had convinced the Soviet government that Western genetics was bourgeois pseudoscience invented to oppress the working class. Lysenko promoted long disproven agricultural methods he claimed could revolutionize crop yields, and anyone who contradicted him with actual genetic science faced imprisonment or death. By 1948, genetics was officially banned in the Soviet Union. More than 3,000 biologists were dismissed or imprisoned. Dozens were executed. Nikolai Vavilov, one of Russia's greatest geneticists and Lysenko's former mentor, was sent to prison and died of starvation in 1943. Dmitry Belyaev refused to let his brother's murder stop him. He had been working in fur animal breeding since 1938, and he'd become fascinated by a question Charles Darwin himself had puzzled over. How did wolves, naturally averse to humans and potentially aggressive, transform over thousands of years into dogs? How did wild animals across multiple species, herbivores and predators alike, develop strikingly similar changes when domesticated? Floppy ears, curly tails, spotted coats, shorter snouts, changes in reproductive cycles. Belyaev had a theory. He believed that selecting for just one behavioral trait, tameness, would trigger all those physical changes. That genes controlling tameness were somehow linked to genes controlling physical appearance. To test this, he needed to conduct a massive, decades long genetics experiment. In 1952, still under Stalin's rule, he couldn't do that openly without ending up like his brother. So he disguised it. Working with a colleague at a fur farm near Tallinn, Estonia, Belyaev began a pilot study selecting and breeding the calmest silver foxes. He framed the work as an effort to improve fur quality and increase litter size for the profitable Soviet fur industry, carefully avoiding any mention of genes or heredity in his reports. After Stalin's death in 1953, Lysenko's grip on Soviet science began to loosen slightly. In 1959, Belyaev moved to the newly established Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia, and expanded his work into a full scale experiment. He recruited a 25 year old biologist named Lyudmila Trut to run the day to day operations. The protocol was straightforward but required extraordinary patience. Each month, foxes were tested for their reaction to humans. A researcher would approach the cage, open the door, and extend a gloved hand. The calmest foxes, those showing the least fear or aggression, were selected to breed. Only the tamest 10 percent of each generation were allowed to reproduce. The results were staggering. By the sixth generation, some fox pups were wagging their tails and seeking attention from handlers like puppies. By the eighth generation, physical changes started appearing that no one had selected for. Floppy ears. Curly tails. Piebald coats with white spotting. Shorter snouts. Changes in hormone levels and reproductive timing. All from selecting only for tameness. Belyaev had compressed a process that took wolves thousands of years to become dogs into just a few decades. He'd proven that domestication wasn't some mysterious collection of random changes, but rather a cascade of linked genetic transformations triggered by selecting for a single behavioral trait. #archaeohistories

@kidLoki350125 @histories_arch She was literally from the Caucasus mountains - she's the ancestor of Caucasians everywhere

@histories_arch Not black enough.

More than four thousand years ago, before the idea of an “author” even existed, one woman stepped forward and signed her name.... Enheduanna lived around 2300 BC, in a world where writing was primarily administrative—lists, laws, inventories scratched into clay. She transformed it into something radical: personal voice. Not myth anonymously handed down, not royal propaganda spoken about gods, but words spoken to them, from an individual soul. As high priestess of the moon god Nanna in the city of Ur, Enheduanna stood at the intersection of religion and empire. She was also the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, architect of the world’s first known empire. Her role was political as much as spiritual: through ritual and poetry, she helped bind conquered Sumerian cities to Akkadian rule. But her writing went far beyond statecraft. In her hymns—especially those devoted to the goddess Inanna—she did something unprecedented. She wrote in the first person. She described fear, humiliation, exile, rage, devotion, and spiritual collapse. When she was violently removed from her temple during a political uprising, she did not record it as history. She wrote it as lived experience: a woman cast down, pleading with a goddess who embodied power, sexuality, destruction, and renewal. This was theology infused with autobiography. Politics braided with prayer. Power examined from the inside. Enheduanna’s language shaped religious thought across Mesopotamia for centuries. Later hymns to gods echoed her structure, her metaphors, her emotional intensity. Scribal schools copied her work long after her death, treating it as a model of literary excellence. Her influence is not hypothetical—it’s traceable in clay tablets found hundreds of miles apart, over generations. What makes her extraordinary is not only that she was first, but how she was first. She claimed authorship. She declared that these words came from her mind, her devotion, her suffering. In doing so, she introduced a concept that underpins all literature that followed: that a single human voice, honestly expressed, can shape culture, belief, and power itself. © Women In World History #archaeohistories

@DanielRJ1974 @histories_arch Because she was literally from the Caucasus mountain, where the word Caucasian came from

@histories_arch Why is she looking Caucasian?

@oelma__ Swedish people

Without using Google - Name ONE thing from Sweden

@mariamenounos noovie doesn't do any of the games or trivia at all anymore, it's just YouTube style ads

@RepJasmine @NikkiHaley you two should meet. Like actually for real sit down together.

@RepJasmine remember this: wherever you find people who reject nuance and context - those people are the extremists. And extremists know no aisle. Extremists cannot tolerate & cannot communicate. They will DESTROY everything that hints at compromise. BE CAREFUL

@theMRC you are completely missing the math by attacking Crockett. She's the Republican's secret weapon - not a theory, the party literally said it. It's not about ideology or policy. Republicans and conservatives need to keep promoting her. Dnc leadership blocked her advancement

Political analysis and @RepJasmine gemini.google.com/share/e9e392b4…

@RepJasmine BE CAREFUL! You're doing things that will get you Bernie'd OR Beto'd. The MTG move is brilliant. YOU'RE brilliant, but big parties don't like bold creative moves and they WILL step you aside if you break new ground and blaze new trails. DON'T GET SIDELINED

@jamestalarico both parties are intolerant of rational thinking and centrists at the moment unfortunately

@jamestalarico just discovered you 15 minutes ago and looking at your record - lifelong Republican, 2x Trump voter, seriously considering you as my next vote. Republican party needs reform and my dream is theyd embrace someone like you because you're too right for national dems

@elonmusk just thinkin.. the real challenge with populating another planet is not crops or humans or machines - it's the ability to sustain a growing population of livestock. That's the key to unlocking multiplanetary civilization. Once we lick that, we're set

@pizzahut your app and website are not working

@GeorgiaWhiteWx @DentonFireDept @cityofdentontx @DENTONPD @DentonScanner Which was obviously the wrong decision. Tornado sirens must be reserved for tornados. B it's literally the only way to know if there is a life threatening emergency. By no means should it be a general weather alert like that

@usarian @DentonFireDept @cityofdentontx @DENTONPD @DentonScanner A quick reminder: tornado sirens are outdoor warning sirens, and they can be used for any situation where people need to head indoors for safety. This storm had a history of hail larger than half an inch, and damaging winds. So Denton EM made the decision to sound the sirens.

SIREN ACTIVATION Winds 70 mph+ in downtown. Blues Feat cancelled. Hail and wind damage to the north. Please take shelter… @cityofdentontx @DENTONPD @DentonScanner

@AGomezFCC But it's not *just* a disturbed individual when millions are cheering the act. When millions more are complicitly by staying silent about both the act and the cheers. When the group that OPENLY CALLED FOR the violence that then DID OCCUR refuses accountability. refuses to stop

An inexcusable act of political violence by one disturbed individual must never be exploited as justification for broader censorship and control. This Administration is increasingly using the weight of government power to suppress lawful expression. 🧵

AI Experiment: claude.ai/share/40616cb8…

Experiments with AI's. Today's prompt: Answer me this one thing: does it even matter. Just answer without asking me what I'm talking about. #chatgpt #gemini #claude #ai

@POTUS @DOGE @elonmusk host events. Do blood tests. Hand out deeds (that include mineral rights) on the spot. Let private companies buy/lease those deeds or pay mineral rights ALSO ON THE SPOT.

@POTUS @DOGE @elonmusk just to f*** with them also - I'm telling ya, REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY was a Republican plan years ago. Land grants and who knows what else. With DNA we now have easy cheap way to prove enslaved ancestry that CAN'T be faked. Parcel out Alaska.