"This may be the force underlying the tendency of artificially selected species to "revert." "

I can not think of any examples of domestic animals "reverting" to wild type when they go feral.  We have hundreds of breeds of domestic pigeons.  Our ferals are the result of escaped domestics surviving and breeding.  But, those ferals are little like wild type in a great many respects.  Domestic dogs have gone feral in several parts of the world.  Not one single case of those ferals reverting to wild type (wolf) exists to my knowledge.  Ditto feral horses in the west of the US.  The closest example of reversion to WT I know of is feral hogs.  And even there they are far from WT.

What is often called reversion is simply mating two domestic breeds and the recessive mutants in both breeds get hidden by dominant WT alleles that.  But, it is well proven those domestic recessive alleles survive in the feral population, just diluted to the point that you seldom get a homozygous individual to allow the recessives to show.

Do you think that if you turned out a population of 1000 cattle from 200 breeds in the wild in a few generations or even in a thousand generations you would get an Auroch by reversion?  I would bet against that happening.

Dick

HL Mencken said: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. "

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