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Lost Americans wheel. Watercolor and ink.

#art #beautiful and stunning op #cut straight to my heart

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sorry he bit you. It’s his coping mechanism

#my dog #also me

[middle-name-queer]

How I feel like everytime when I post some art

[middle-name-queer]

Bugs on your dash.

#post of all time #digital drawing #and thank you to everyone who said something nice about my bugs! #bugs #tarantula hawk wasp #there's two things really funny about this image but no one needs to know

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Sunbear

#digital drawing #digital art #sunbear #bears

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see i like this one

#digital drawing #digital art

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Friend said. Hedgehog does laundry. And so.

#digital drawing #hedgehog

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Something. Kind of

#reblog my flop art #skeleton #another wip honestly i never figured out where to go with #digital drawing

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Eh....

#swear i'm still working on this one #anatomical heart #blood #digital drawing

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some sketches for fun.

#shameless self reblog #trying to inspire myself with old stuff i like #digital art #animal sketch

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imagine thinking a 5,000 $ buyout was comparable to a 5,000,000 $ buyout. disgusting.

[middle-name-queer]

rewatching breaking bad and it's admittedly heightened as a rewatch. but also good god do i hate walt. oh dear god i hate him

[middle-name-queer]

the problem with autism is sometimes you want to do something (brave) but you need someone to gently walk you through each step so you know what will happen. and people don’t like doing that

#don't know i'm autistic but i do relate to this and boy howdy does it pose a challenge

[middle-name-queer]

why do people get so ableist when it comes to food stuff btw? like getting all worked up about people getting delivery n shit. obviously i agree its an exploitative business model but i really dont think its the fault of disabled people who are physically unable to cook for themselves or are having a particularly rough day and have minimal or non existent support systems. and dont get me started on the way people talk about "picky eaters". cooking culture has weird inways to ableism that suck and i love food and cooking but i think some people should practice the arts of withholding kneejerk judgements about how people go about getting their sustenance and minding their own business. you are not a doctor you are a 26 year old twitter leftist with a tony soprano avatar.

[middle-name-queer]

do want that science coffee from breaking bad. bet it is good

#yeah science #breaking bad

[middle-name-queer]

I looked up some stuff about the "domestication syndrome" in animals because I read a couple times in books the idea that domesticated animals are neotenous, meaning they retain juvenile traits into adulthood. The idea being that humans have essentially created more helpless, more exploitable versions of wild animals to "dominate" and abuse nature.

I thought, "Okay, that sounds like something that couldn't be proven. How much do we even know about the juvenile brain development of, say, wild goats or boars, anyway?"

So I found this review of the literature that goes back to the fur farm fox domestication study and it's even worse than I thought: We don't even know that a 'domestication syndrome' in animals exists at all, let alone whether it is a retention of juvenile traits into adulthood.

So the fur farm fox domestication study: you may have heard of it, it claimed to have demonstrated that within a few generations, by selecting for tameness, the researchers bred "domesticated" foxes with a whole suite of traits that appear in many domesticated animals but seem unrelated to tameness, such as piebald coloration and floppy ears. The idea is that the genes for tameness and for these other traits commonly seen in domestic animals are linked, that is, an animal that inherits one is likely to inherit the other.

There's some major problems. First of all, all the foxes used in the study were from fur farms, and had already been selected for some level of docility and for coat color variation. The foxes didn't get white spots on them because they were selected for tameness, instead the pre-existing population they were selected from had those genes in it to begin with. Also, the effective population size of the foxes in the study was pretty small, meaning a small amount of genetic drift could have a big impact.

Second, there isn't very much evidence for most of the "domestication syndrome" traits in most animals. Even where the "domestication syndrome" traits can be found, they are often particular to specific breeds, and it's unclear whether they are linked to domestication as such or just the development of that specific breed.

This study only deals with a few animals, mostly small animals. It would be even more interesting to see a breakdown of even more animals (particularly more large animals). Off the top of my head, almost none of these would apply to horses, and only in specific cases would apply to cattle. Even in dogs, extreme changes in skull morphology have happened relatively recently with breeders in modern times going after extreme phenotypes.

Particular to cats: extreme skull changes and floppy ears occur as part of some "breeds" because they are specific painful genetic disorders that breeders of cats decided to perpetuate VERY recently. Scottish Folds were deliberately developed from cats that just so happened to have a disease that causes them to be in constant suffering due to their messed up joints, it's not just a variation that regularly pops up in cats to varying extents. Likewise with the smushed-face Persians. Their brains are getting squished into where their spinal cords should go because their skulls are so messed up from selective breeding for an extreme look.

What domestication means has been majorly shaken up in the past hundred years. With companion animals, breeders are in a race to make the most screwed up animal with the most extreme, striking traits possible, and with livestock animals, lots of heritage breeds with more variations have straight up gone extinct because they've been flattened into industrial monocultures to produce meat and milk as efficiently as possible, health and genetic diversity be damned.

To study domestication itself, you would have to study landrace breeds, right?

Basically there isn't one thing that domestication is

[middle-name-queer]

hmmm

#me with my tiny car