Question

1. A) Based on your knowledge of the physical, physiological and behavioral changes that take place during domestication (particularly in the Farm Fox Experiment, but in other domesticated species as well) provide FOUR brief (1-2 sentences, max) pieces of evidence to suggest why domestication may have had adaptive value in early populations of “proto-dogs” and thus was favored by natural selection. Include comparative evidence and experimental evidence in your answers.

B) In many species, behavioral adaptations reflect neural adaptations. For example, various species exhibit cortical magnification of ecologically important regions of the somatosensory cortex. Define cortical magnification and provide an example of it in one species

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Answer 1

Domestication involves both natural and artificial selection. Natural selection may act to develop individuals that are more tolerent of human so that they can exploit human domiciles as food sources.Artifical selection can leads to animals with trait explicity desired by humans.

1.) COMPARATIVE EVIDENCE

genomic and morphological evidence suggests that the canids that become dogs may have started differentiating themselves from wolves. The earliest archaeological evidence of dogs and human companions, in the form of a co-burial of human with a dogs.

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

Farm fox experiment is an example of artificial demostication.In the late 1950s and extending over more than forty years, investigated the effect of artificial selection of silver foxes.In each new generation of foxes, individual were rated on their behaviroul response to human during a series of tests.This included measuring a fox's reaction to human approaching in cage, having a human hand in its cage, and its willingness to eat from human hand.

2.) In many species, behavioral adaptations reflect neural adaptations. For example, predator avoidance and prey capture are among the most vital of animal behaviours.They require fast reactions controlled by comarativelly stright forwarded neural circuits often containing giant neurons.

• CORTICAL MAGNIFICATION-Cortical Magnification describe how many neuron in an area of the visual cortex are 'responsible' for processing a stimulus of a given size size, as a function of visual field location.Visual performance depents importantly on the amount of cortical tissue devoted to the task.

Examples of extreme cortical magnification of behaviourally relevent effectors for somatosensory cortex of the duck-bulled platypus,star-nosed mole, raccon, and nacked mole rat.Although the specilized morphological structure and associated sensory receptor arrays are on different body parts, the same principles of magnification in the neo cortex is observed.