(What's not to like about a book that regularly comes up with quips like these?) Francis seems to have forgotten, however, that elephants have been domesticated, and he writes that the aurochs is the largest domesticated animal. Oddly, he thinks (incorrectly) that the singular of aurochs is auroch. In fact, the singular is aurochs; the word is cognate with ox (think ur-ox). It is odd that the copy editor did not catch this mistake, because the book seems to be generally well prepared (we will not, however, discuss the use of grizzly where grisly was meant). Sheep and goats (Francis prefers goats), reindeer, camels, horses, rodents: Francis covers them all, often beginning a chapter with a curious anecdote. Horses, for example, were originally domesticated for their meat; only later, after other meat sources were available, was the horse used for transportation and warfare. The horse's status has risen so sharply that most Europeans and their cultural descendants "would be about as aghast at the thought of eating horse meat as they would dog meat." Francis devotes 2 chapters to the question whether humans domesticated themselves. The argument is long, and I am afraid you will have to read it for yourself, but it depends in part on the argument that humans, like other domesticated animals, are neotenous, that is, the adult animal retains juvenile features, such as big eyes. I got slightly bogged down in one chapter by the profusion of terms like hominid, hominin, hominine, and hominoid (which I think of as homonym-oids). The second of these chapters asks whether human hypersociality came as the result of self-domestication by way of natural selection for tameness. Answer: "It ain't necessarily so"; Francis wants more evidence. The final chapter, except for an epilogue, is called "The Anthropocene" and asks how an utterly obscure, bipedal, nearly hairless ape could in a mere few hundred thousand years come to dominate the planet and indeed be responsible for the most recent mass extinction. I cannot go into detail here, but I am left with the feeling that it was mostly "cultural evolution," with biological evolution following thereafter – as when herdsmen begin to use dairy products (cultural evolution) and only thereafter does an allele for lactose tolerance predominate (biological evolution).[N]o matter how tame these early domesticates were, by auroch[s] standards, you would still need to be a lot braver than a bull leaper to push their calves aside and pull on their teats.
______
Appendix 1. I resolved not to read the appendixes; generally I do not like appendixes or endnotes1 and think that a topic should be incorporated into the book if it is important enough and dropped if it is not (excluding very abstruse derivations and whatnot). Nevertheless, I began to read the appendixes and was treated to a discussion of the need for a new synthesis that gets away from the gene-centered view popularized by Richard Dawkins, a serious and hard-hitting critique of evolutionary psychology, and also some boring stuff. Appendix 2. As one of the self-appointed guardians of the modern metric system, I disliked the book's use of "mya" for "million years ago"; if anything, the usage should have been "Mya." But that is not really satisfactory either, because "y" and "a," though not SI symbols, are both commonly used as a symbol for "year." I probably would have used "Ma" for "megannus," since "year" is Anglocentric. In addition, when he means tens or hundreds of thousands of years, the author uses "BP," presumably meaning "before present," which is arguably OK, but not consistent with the previous usage. At least once, he used "CE," which is perhaps more useful than "BP" when we are discussing more or less historical times, but again is inconsistent.
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1 My son also had a raccoon in his chimney; unfortunately, his died there, with unfortunate consequences involving maggots. I really did not want to tell you that, but I wanted to make a point about the endnotes. The book has a significant number of endnotes. Many of them simply cite a reference, but others have content. I find it very distracting to have to stop my reading and go to an endnote. Part of the art of writing is culling: if something was worth telling, the author should have worked it into the text or, otherwise, killed it.
34 Comments
Paul Burnett · 25 July 2015
Does the book discuss bees, which have also been domesticated for millennia?
https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad · 25 July 2015
I guess if we domesticated mice, why not domesticate other vermin, like raccoons?
Just forget about rats though. Oh, right, who ever decided to do that?
Glen Davidson
Matt Young · 25 July 2015
harold · 25 July 2015
Does the book offer a definition of domestication?
All traditional domesticated animals have traits that raccoons and foxes don't share.
First of all they all do one or more of the following -
1) Provide an efficient source of meat for humans.
2) Provide a material humans use for food or textiles - wool, eggs, milk, etc.
3) Do a job for humans. The ones that do a job - horses (their job is now
mainly anachronistic), dogs (still used for hunting and guarding), cats (still hunt vermin), and ferrets (still hunt vermin) - also tend to become friendly pets for humans. I suppose it's not surprising that we get friendlier with them when eating them is less of the reason for keeping them around.
Cattle are the only ones I can think of that routinely do it all - you can eat them as beef, use them as a source of dairy products, use their hides for textiles, oxen will pull things for you, and dairy cows tend to bond in a somewhat friendly manner.
I don't see how raccoons, or pigeons, or cockroaches, or house mice, fit into this. Sure, they're species that can tolerate humans. So are deer in many areas. Driving through a rich suburb a while ago I saw a doe and fawn calmly walking around. Staten Island has a large population of wild turkeys. Squirrels do tend to flee at that last moment but are pretty arrogant around humans.
However, tolerating humans is necessary but not sufficient for domestication.
I'm quite tolerant of non-rabid raccoons making use of garbage that I don't want any more, as long as they keep out of sight, but it's a far cry from domestication.
Matt Young · 25 July 2015
I do not remember whether the book defines domestication explicitly, but I would be surprised if it did not. At any rate, neither Francis nor I said that raccoons are wholly domesticated. He (we) said that tolerating humans and living close by was the first step. Domestication is more than merely tolerating humans or living commensally with them.
I do not see why we cannot consider an animal domesticated even if it serves no useful (to us) purpose. I suspect that horses once "did it all" but westerners are squeamish about eating them.
harold · 25 July 2015
harold · 25 July 2015
There are animals we take pure advantage of - the ones we hunt, which gain nothing from the relationship (no, not "population control", that's only a factor because we killed off the carnivore competition for hunting them, and they only evolved to need it because of carnivores in the first place).
There are the ones who take advantage of us. Cockroaches and house flies provide no advantage to us whatsoever, for example.
Then there are the few we have a strong symbiotic relationship with. We feed them and make it easy for them to breed, they provide back a benefit. In the modern world it may be mainly recreation and emotional bond but historically, in all cases, it was outright physical benefit. Those are the ones I call domesticated.
Until raccoons can figure out something useful to do for me, they're no closer to being domesticated than house mice, which have probably been living around us since the paleolithic and have never become "domesticated". Sure a raccoon might want to live in my dwelling and eat some of my food, but that's a one way street.
Now raccoons have evolved ability to tolerate and deal with humans, and that is an interesting trait and worth studying. It's just not "domestication" as I see it.
https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad · 25 July 2015
https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad · 25 July 2015
Matt Young · 25 July 2015
I just searched the beginning of the book, and I am afraid he defines domestication the way Potter Stewart defined pornography. But he surely means a closer relationship than the commensal relationship between the raccoon and the human, which you keep harping on. No one ever said that the raccoon living in the storm drain was domesticated, but the relationship between those raccoons and humans is likely similar to the early relationship between humans and wolves. Eventually the wolves that best tolerated humans evolved into village dogs, which live and forage in and around human settlements, to dogs that live with humans, not just around them. But no one called the wolves domesticated just because they ventured into human territory.
Robert Byers · 25 July 2015
Its interesting although I've seen these points many other places as because of being a creationist I note how, unrelated to selection, there was these changes in these creatures bodies.
WHY is it convergent evolution that is going on in bringing like results to unlike domesticated creatures? I don't see what is being selected here? Instead I say its innate triggers, I don't know how, that bring like results. No convergent evolution going on at all even if it did ever go on anywhere. Of coarse I don't think it did.
I understand they find Egyptian pictures, 2500BC, of Dalmatian dogs and so why is that not a breed. in fact they always had big hunting dogs and so on. so breed is a old concept surely.
David MacMillan · 25 July 2015
Yes, they did have many breeds of dogs in 2500 BCE, basically most of the same breeds we have today. Which is very odd if all those breeds had to be bred in the span of just a couple hundred years after the Flood...yet they have barely changed one iota in the meantime.
Rolf · 26 July 2015
Now I know the why and how of the phenomenon of Mr. Robert Byers' always beat science:
Knowitall
DS · 26 July 2015
Of coarse booby still hasn't learned the difference between "of course" and "of coarse", even though he has been repeatedly corrected here many times on that very issue. It is a old concept surely. I can only conclude that either he is incapable of learning or he is being deliberately obtuse. Either way, he has nothing of substance to contribute to any scientific discussion. Why does he think he knows more than all the experts when he can't even figure out how to use a question mark. (I did that on purpose).
AS for the dogs, there was an article on the subject recently:
Scientific America (2015) From Wolf to Dog 313(1):60-67
The article discusses recent genetic evidence, including evidence of gene flow between lineages.
harold · 26 July 2015
Just Bob · 26 July 2015
Would our human-specific intestinal flora count as 'domesticated'? They do vital work for us, and many of them are probably not viable outside of a human environment. They have adapted to the niche of the human gut. We didn't intentionally domesticate them (nor were we even aware of them), but we didn't intentionally and systematically cause the changes in the larger plants and animals that we domesticated in ancient times, either.
I demand proper recognition for the little guys!
Sylvilagus · 26 July 2015
For what its worth, my Merriam Webster from 1993 gives the second definition of "grizzly" as a variant spelling of "grisly."
So does my 1977 edition. I also found a citation for the OED stating the same, though I don't find that in the online version I just checked.
Matt Young · 26 July 2015
Michael Fugate · 26 July 2015
It is also worth noting that domesticating animals and plants changed us as much as we changed them. Lactose tolerance is just one example.
Joe Felsenstein · 26 July 2015
Over 50 years ago I spent several summers in the summer programs of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, where all work was with mice. I then had a job in college working in the "mouse room" of a developmental biologist. So I got a lot of experience with mice.
Lab mice are descended from domestic mice kept by mouse fanciers, the lab strains originating about the 1920s. They are domesticated in the sense that they are far less aggressive and hyperreactive. The saying was that if you put a lab mouse and a wild mouse in a cage and then took the top off, an instant later you would have only the lab mouse in the cage.
When a mouse escapes, it is much more likely to be killed in the ensuing pursuit, or maybe even succeed in getting away. This makes for a strong artifical selection for placidity. Similarly, a mouse that bites its keeper has a dramatically lower fitness.
Lab mice show strong behavioral differences from wild mice. For all that, they show no desire to cuddle or willingness to fetch the newspaper.
fusilier · 27 July 2015
A Niggle:
Somewhere I once read that working elephants are not domesticated. Instead they are "tamed." The distinction had to do with captive breeding and other physiological/anatomical changes.
So the claim in the book that the aurochs is the largest _domesticated_ animal might follow that notion.
YMMV, to be sure.
fusilier
James 2:24
eric · 27 July 2015
Matt Young · 27 July 2015
Just Bob · 27 July 2015
Robert Byers · 27 July 2015
As a YEC creationist I think this makes a case for a paper on this issue.
Did all the reduction etc traits that happen to domesticated animals come from evolution?
how did selection bring these results? The author says it the breeding for tameness that did it. yet why? why should tame equal floppy ears etc. That was not the goal of selection.
These creatures had a biological change in thier bodies wothout selection on mutations or selection for these changes. jUst a unexpected result. Like the foxes case.
therefore since it always happens then it must mean there is another mechanism being triggered to bring these changes.
the selection for tameness, if that really happened much after a time, triggers some other mechanism in the bodies.
if in domestication then why not greater in nature, like darwin talked about, .
I think there is a option here that domesication changes show a non evolutionary influence in bringing body changes.
Something for a creationist or sharp researcher to investigate.
Looking in our cats eyes we have missed a cute criticism of evolutionism.
Sylvilagus · 28 July 2015
RCF · 28 July 2015
Hi all. And thank you for the thoughtful review of "Domesticated Matt.
A few thoughts on some recurrent questions.
1. Why I did not define domestication. Surprisingly, there is no widely accepted definition and I find them all inadequate. For example, Diamond defines domestication as something like genetic modification to human ends. This works for the last stages of domestication, when it is entirely under conscious human control, but not for most of the domestication process, which is often initiated by the domesticating species for their own self-interest. This is often referred to as self-domestication. Wolves were originally self-domesticated and continued to be so long after they approached the doggy state. Cats remain largely self-domesticated. For example, most domestic cats mate with whoever they damn well please.
I treated domestication as an evolutionary process not a well-defined end state. As such there is a continuum in the degree of domestication. So what criterion trait best characterizes this continuum. Tameness is the primary trait under selection during domestication in mammals. Floppy ears, shortened snouts, depigmentation (white coloration), reduced brain size and reduced sex differences are all largely correlated byproducts of selection for tameness. Some elements of this domestication syndrome were also exaltations for life the human environment. A different possible criterion for the domestication continuum is the degree to which humans control reproduction through mate choice. By this criterion, dogs are more domesticated than cats, which are more domesticated than reindeer.
In retrospect, I see now that I should have at least offered my own definition of domestication, or the best criterion for the domestication continuum, however inadequate.
With the continuum in mind, consider elephants, lab mice and raccoons.
2. Are elephants domesticated. The short answer is no. Like all evolutionary processes domestication requires genetic alterations. There is no evidence of such for Asian elephants.
3. The lab mouse is a domesticated form of the house mouse, which is a wild human commensal. The lab mouse genome contains contributions from three of the four house mouse subspecies, two of which were already present in fancy mice (also domesticated house mice). When the third subspecies was interbred with fancy mice, we got lab mice.
4. What about raccoons. Urban raccoons have certainly become tamer than their forest counterparts but raccoons have enormous behavioral phenotypic plasticity. To have entered the domestication continuum, we must demonstrate that the behavioral alterations in urban raccoons extend beyond what can be achieved through phenotypic plasticity alone. The jury is still out. As human commensals, raccoons, like house mice are certainly vulnerable to future domestication, as are European badgers and perhaps even some kangaroo populations, such as those around Canberra.
5. The taxonomic scope of this book was limited to mammals, not because I am mammal-centric--I am currently writing about yeast domestication for beer and winemaking--but in the service of the main evolutionary theme of this book, which is evolutions conservatism. Why do all domesticating mammals tend toward the suite of traits called the domestication syndrome or domesticated phenotype. On standard adaptationist accounts this convergence is caused by similarities--and hence selective pressures-- in the human environment. If we look to evolution's conservative side, however, as demonstrated by evo devo and comparative genomics, we see that this is only part of the story. Deep homologies shared by all mammals by virtue of descent from a common ancestor go a long way toward explaining why all mammals tend to respond similarly during domestication. The homologies I discussed in the book included the stress response (hypothalamic--pituitary-adrenal axis, the limbic system of the brain (which mediates emotional behavior), and the migration of neural crest cells during development.
6. I had an excellent copy editor who saved me much embarrassment. The mistake re "aurochs" versus "auroch" is on me.
Henry J · 28 July 2015
Re "Good⦠Recognizes a mechanism is needed.â¦. Now to propose one and design an experiment. . We are actually close here to hypothesizing how real genetics systems work."
My guess would be that with selection for a few particular traits being emphasized, that allows increased amounts of genetic drift in DNA for other traits that have ceased being a significant factor in reproductive success.
Robert Byers · 28 July 2015
This comment has been moved to The Bathroom Wall.
DS · 29 July 2015
Sure booby. Hypothesis all you want. All it comes down to is "i dont wannna believe it, so i aint" a gonna". How about testing your hypothesis? Has that ever entered into your thought processes? Why don't you intelligently design an experiment to distinguish between the predictions of evolution and your hypothesis? Do the experiment and report your results in a scientific journal. Then we can talk. Until then, you lose.
Matt Young · 29 July 2015
Mr. Byers has exceeded his allocation by 2, and his comment has been sent to the Bathroom Wall. Please reply to him there (or not).
Matt Young · 29 July 2015
On the other hand Science reports that city birds are more aggressive than country birds. Turns out that certain sparrows became more aggressive when they had more food to defend. Note to creationists: researchers tested that hypothesis by providing country birds with more food and noted that they became more aggressive than before.
Jason Mitchell · 29 July 2015
I have not read the book - but I have seen studies (that RCF refers to above, I think) that demonstrate the link between pigment cells and behavior. It turns out that Melanin and Adrenaline producing cells have similar/connected developmental pathways and that selecting for one (tameness - lower adrenaline) has an effect on the other (pigment cell distribution/ piebald/spotted phenotypes) IIRC there are also demonstrated developmental links with some skeletal features and neurological pathways (tameness and floppy ears etc.) That this suite of phenotypes (domestication syndrome) is seen across many mammalian species is consistent with common ancestry (and not consistent with them being unrelated/ specially created 'kinds').
also for the lurkers out there: Symbiosis (as the term is used by biologists) is not only mutualism (where both species benefit from the relationship) but also includes parasitism and predation. I've often seen domestication described as symbiosis where humans benefit occurring simultaneously with selective pressure on the domesticated species. (or more simply domesticated species are those that we bred for our benefit which are no longer the same as their wild counterparts)
eric · 29 July 2015