“rose beats everyone at scrabble” is still one of my favorite headcanons
rose, in a sports anime antagonist voice: i would seem congratulations are in order, dirk. as it stands, we each have only five tiles left, and i’m only ten points ahead of you. i’m sure you’ve figured out through process of elimination that the missing “q” and “x” tiles are in my hand, and if the game ends while i still have them, they’ll be subtracted from my final score, ensuring your victory. however, things are not always as they seem….. you, see, you made a miscalculation. four turns ago when you placed “tic” just adjacent to the final available triple word score space, rendering it seemingly unusable, i’m sure you counted it as a strategic victory- little did you know you were ensuring your own defeat.
dirk, with an expression of dawning realization: impossible!
rose places “quixotic” on the final triple word score, winning the game. the gathered spectators collectively lose their shit.
domestication syndrome is one of the coolest findings from recent genetics
Yes!
Basically scientists have found that if you start selecting for people-friendly animals, you see a bunch of hypothetically unrelated traits start showing up in all sorts of mammal species: floppy ears, piebald/patterned coats, etc.
This is true for everything from cows to dogs to rats! One of the coolest long term studies on this has been the Russian fox experiments.
So essentially the science goes like this:
You have two copies of every genes, one from each parent.
We tend to simplify genetics, and say that for every single gene you have it is random,l coin flip which copy you pass on to you offspring. We also tend think of genes as a 1:1 ratio of genes—>traits.
But! This is not quite the case.
Genes have a specific physical location and order relative to each other on your chromosomes, and the chance of genes being inherited together goes up the closer together they are located. This means random, unrelated traits can wind up being more commonly inherited together in specific patterns just because those genes are located close together, and you don’t get that completely random reshuffling of two parent’s traits. Some of them tend to stay “stuck” together.
This is called linkage, and it’s why you often see red hair, pale skin, and freckles together, for example.
The second factor that plays into this is that a lot of times 1 gene affects several different traits (or several different genes affect 1 trait). This means that sometimes you really *can’t* untangle two traits because they have a similar cause. For example, say genes for increased aggression are responsible both for making a spider a better hunter (pro) and making a spider more likely to eat its offspring (con). Because the same gene is the cause of both things, natural selection can’t really untangle them.
Circling back to the redhead/freckles/pale skin example, these traits are affected by a number of different genes, but also one gene in particular: MCR1, a gene that changes how your body responds to hormones promoting melanin production. Again, one gene related to pigment production can affect a BUNCH of different traits. (And also skin cancer risk. Fun!)
Domestication Syndrome in mammals turns out to be due to both linkage and genes affect by multiple traits!
See, when we domestic animals we want them to be friendlier/less aggressive, which normally translates to less FEARFUL.
And it turns out that the same genes involved in adrenal responses and other stress reactions are also involved in melanin, cartilage, and bone production. So when we domesticate animals we get these recurring changes in pigmentation (white patches, piebald costs), floppy ears (cartilage), shorter muzzles and other changes in physical stature (bone growth), etc.
We also wind up selecting for a lot of neotenic genes in general— that is, retention of childhood traits into adulthood. That’s because baby animals tend to have lots of friendly/trusting/biddable/curious traits we are looking for.
And honestly, who can say no to a face like this?
ps, since it was mentioned:
the same genes involved in domestication probably help animals form social groups in general. if you need to get along with and trust strangers you need a decrease in the panic/aggression genes.
cats, for example, probably domesticated themselves when they started living close to each other and to humans to feed off of pests in grain silos.
and yeah, some some recent theories suggest humans may have ‘domesticated’ themselves:
so basically you’re saying that when we breed animals to be friends, they become friend-shaped.
I definitely don’t remember this from lecture but I cant stop laughing
the prevalence of discarded beer bottles has actually impacted this species pretty badly because they’re so much bigger and more visible than a real female. They are more attracted to the beer bottles.
it happens with humans, too
I absolutely love that this appears to be a universal sexual phenomenon
remember that first live action scooby doo movie. where the antagonist was literally scrappy doo and he was stealing peoples souls, like actually really stealing and absorbing souls, and was planning on taking scoobys soul to rule the world with an army of demons and get revenge on the gang after they abandoned him because he kept peeing in the car, and near the end he turned into this huge dog monster
a real movie
shit. shit
I researched this because I saw this movie in cinemas when I was like 6 goddamn years old and remembering its existence just now blew my mind. James Gunn screenwrote this. The writer and director of Guardians of the Galaxy, 12 full years before his most successful film. He stated in interviews that he hated Scrappy’s guts and “their whole goal was to destroy Scrappy forever”, since the character was famously brought in to Scooby Doo in the 80s to help ratings and was almost immediately overexposed and overmarketed to the point that many fans hate him.
And they totally did. He hasn’t appeared in anything Scooby Doo related since, except for these throwaway allusions as a nightmare-like traumatic event for the rest of the gang. Depending how you wanna interpret those references the canon fate of Scrappy Doo was that he went nuts and tried to kill anyone. Also, according to this movie he was never even a puppy, just “had a glandular issue”, which makes all those times he went “puppy power” really creepy in hindsight tbh
I haven’t watched a SD related thing in years but I spent like a half hour looking into and reading about this. Worth.
The best part is that Gunn is still proud of this and admits to writing him as the villain because scrappy is a “completely fucking awful person”
I wish to be as proud of my fanfiction as James Gunn is of his SD movie
