This is about an early video game made by Steve Grand who became famous for the Creatures series.
38 karma · joined January 25, 2020
However, I have never actually been able to program in Common Lisp without repeatedly getting to the point where it seems I have to restart the whole system. I suspect because somehow the state of the code and the state of the system got out of sync. So until now I have always given up, and used C-like languages after all, because there are more well-tested libraries available, and because I never managed to use the full potential of Common Lisp anyway.
I would really like to learn how to use Common Lisps full potential though.
"Dr. Frank, among other things at Montreal, had a pair of tame foxes lead about on the main streets, driven around in automobiles and taken to a public dance, where the girls did the fox trot with these foxes around their necks, and all this was photographed, moving pictures taken, etc., and to cap the climax Dr. Frank hired two airplanes, took up a pair of foxes in one and from the other airplane a photograph ground out several reels to be shown in the movies in the near future."
How common these traits were is another difficult question. But given that there was prior selection for tameness and that Belyaev specifically looked for those tame foxes to include in his experiment [3], it does not seem so surprising that this trait very quickly became more common.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/12/03/tame-foxes...
[2] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433090788674&vi...
"The history of the Farm-Fox population undermines the commonly repeated narrative that a suite of domestication syndrome traits emerged solely as a result of selecting on tameness. There is no temporal link between most of the syndrome traits, which first appeared in Prince Edward Island (PEI) fur farms, and the later behavioral selection in Russia."
On the spotted fur [1]:
"The farm-fox breeders of PEI intentionally selected for white spotting and other unusual coat patterns (Figure 3). They noticed that crossing two white-marked foxes occasionally resulted in animals that held their heads askew, a phenomenon Belyaev would later describe in his population, suggesting shared genetic etiology. White spotting was more common in Belyaev’s selected than unselected populations, but has not been associated with less fearful behavior in individuals (Figure 2D)."
On the floppy ears [1]:
"The farm foxes of PEI occasionally had floppy ears, even as adults (Figure 3C). In the Farm-Fox Experiment, ‘delayed ear raising’ was noted (ears floppy past 3 weeks of age, but not necessarily into adulthood). While slightly more common in the selected population, the trait is extremely rare, and no association between delayed ear raising and less fearful behavior in individuals has been described (Figure 2D)."
"The Farm-Fox Experiment selected for a behavioral trait that already existed in the population (Figure 3), essentially recapitulating a selection experiment performed on numerous occasions with dog breeds. [...] The change in the critical period of socialization in the selected foxes is more like the difference between more and less easily socialized dog breeds than between dogs and wolves."
"A widespread misconception maintains that the Farm-Fox Experiment started with wild foxes and recapitulated the entire process of domestication. Belyaev himself accurately described the founders as fur-farm foxes, but by referring to the unselected population as ‘wild controls’, contributed to this misconception. In reality, the experiment started with a fox population from eastern Canada that had been captive and purpose-bred since the late 1800s, something Belyaev and his colleagues may have been initially unaware of."