This is an important new “frame” for understanding humans.
The article proposes:
“Long before humans domesticated other animals, we may have domesticated ourselves. Over many generations, some scientists propose, humans selected among themselves for tameness. "
Notice that this statement equates “domestic” with “tame”. Is this valid? Tame is a frame with unexplored dimensions. Here’s a googled set of definitions: Notice that the antonyms — at least to my ear — are more appealing than the synonyms.
adjective:
(of an animal) not dangerous or frightened of people; domesticated."the fish are so tame you have to push them away from your face mask” domesticated, domestic, docile, tamed, broken, trained; More gentle, mild; pet, housebroken; house-trained not exciting, adventurous, or controversial."network TV on Saturday night is a pretty tame affair"
(of an animal) not dangerous or frightened of people; domesticated."the fish are so tame you have to push them away from your face mask” domesticated, domestic, docile, tamed, broken, trained; More gentle, mild; pet, housebroken; house-trained not exciting, adventurous, or controversial."network TV on Saturday night is a pretty tame affair"
unexciting, uninteresting, uninspiring, dull, bland, flat, insipid, spiritless, pedestrian, colorless, run-of-the-mill, mediocre, ordinary, humdrum, boring; harmless, safe, inoffensive "it was a pretty tame affair”
amenable, biddable, cooperative, willing, obedient, tractable, acquiescent, docile, submissive, compliant, meek "
antonyms:
antonyms:
wild, fierce, exciting, uncooperative
”This process resulted in genetic changes, several recent studies suggest, that have shaped people in ways similar to other domesticated species.”
This is the statement that brings it into the discussion of embodied thought, specifically in humans. That is, we think with our whole bodies in ways the body structure dictates.
“Tameness, says evolutionary biologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, may boil down to a reduction in reactive aggression — the fly-off-the-handle temperament that makes an animal bare its teeth at the slightest challenge. In this sense, he says, humans are fairly tame. We might show great capacity for premeditated aggression, but we don’t attack every stranger we encounter.”
Related Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acOZT240bTA
“Sometime in the last 200,000 years, humans began weeding out people with an overdose of reactive aggression, Wrangham suggests. Increasingly complex social skills would have allowed early humans to gang up against bullies, he proposes”, pointing out that hunter-gatherers today have been known to do the same.
This is what is meant by self-domestication. It leads to evolving physical changes in the brain and in appearance — the head and face change.
“Selecting for less-aggressive humans could have also helped us flourish as a social species, says Antonio Benítez-Burraco, who studies language evolution at the University of Huelva in Spain. The earliest Homo sapiens were becoming capable of complex thought, he proposes, but not yet language. “We were modern in the sense of having modern brains, but we were not modern in behavior.”
“Once humans began to self-domesticate, though, changes to neural crest cells could have nudged us toward a highly communicative species.”
Science and technology at the level we see today is not possible without high levels of communication supported by non-aggressive behavior. But what the heck are “neural-crest cells”?
“Neural crest cells are a temporary group of cells unique to vertebrates that arise from the embryonic ectoderm cell layer, and in turn give rise to a diverse cell lineage—including melanocytes, craniofacial cartilage and bone, smooth muscle, peripheral and enteric neurons and glia.”
So to paraphrase, these are a “stage” in the development of a human body. What begins as “blastosphere” or ball of very early cells starts morphing into different kinds, each assigned to “make” different parts of the body. I’ll stop defining here because there’s too much to tell. You can research for yourself or I’ll try to pick up “neural crest cells” in a separate post. (It follows directly.)
This story appears in the July 8, 2017, issue of Science News as a sidebar with the headline, "Domesticating us."
“. . . Marrying that DNA data with archaeological findings, the context in which the bones were discovered, for example, may tell researchers more about when, where and how humans first engaged with plants and animals. Recent results are already rewriting the stories of rice, horse and chicken domestication.
One central developmental change — in a temporary clump of cells called the neural crest — may be behind the suite of characteristics known as domestication syndrome.”
“The pace of research, much of it seemingly contradictory, will only increase in the near future, Larson predicts. “We’re going to get a lot more confused before we figure out what’s really going on.”
One source of this theory is the research on foxes.
“Since 2002, Anna Kukekova has been making annual treks to Novosibirsk. A geneticist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she travels to Siberia each year to collect blood from hundreds of silver foxes to look for genetic changes that produce tame and aggressive behaviors.”
"In Kukekova’s early visits, about 70 percent of the tame foxes were considered “elite,” aquiver with excitement when people came around. The rest of the tame ones “didn’t mind if you petted them, but they weren’t super excited to interact with you,” she says. Now, almost every tame fox is in the super-friendly elite group. (Foxes bred to be aggressive, on the other hand, are definitely not happy to have people around, much like the fearful rats Cagan encountered at the institute.)
"Even though the friendly Novosibirsk foxes are genetically tame — some are sold as pets — not everyone would call the animals domesticated. “In an apartment, they would probably be very difficult pets,” Kukekova says. The foxes have a strong odor, are more active at night and they aren’t easily house-trained. The combination of living with people plus inherited changes in the foxes’ genomes may eventually make them fully domesticated, but they aren’t there yet."
"Researchers have set out several biological criteria that should determine when silver foxes, or other animals, cross the line that divides merely tame from fully domesticated. Number one: Domesticated animals are genetically distinct from their wild forebears, and they inherit their human-friendly demeanor. That’s different from wild animals that have been tamed but don’t pass on that tameness to the next generation."
"Two: Domestication makes animals dependent on humans for food and, for the most part, reproduction. Three: Breeding with wild counterparts becomes difficult, if not impossible. For example, domesticated plants don’t drop their seeds when ripe; they rely on humans to spread their progeny. Finally, domesticated animals and plants should bear the physical hallmarks of domestication syndrome, such as a smaller skull for animals, and a narrower footprint for plants."
But “domestication” is not just a matter of calm mammals. The concept can be applied to plants or creatures that were selectively bred to be useful to humans. When we use DNA intervention to change living beings, the changes are abrupt and not necessarily positive.
“In China, people began domesticating the larvae of silk moths for the fine, strong threads of their cocoons as early as 7,500 years ago, genetic evidence suggests. People bred the larvae to produce more silk and to tolerate human handling and extreme crowding (For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese kept their silk-making methods top secret, and smuggling silkworms out of the country was punishable by death. Silk makers traded their monopolized fabric throughout Eurasia along the Silk Road. To this day, the only other insect that is domesticated is the honeybee. — Erika Engelhaupt
When we use DNA intervention in a lab to change living beings, the changes are abrupt and not necessarily positive. But other mammals domesticate themselves. In a coming post I want to discuss cats, because some are domestic and some are not, regardless of their DNA. In fact, they are capable of moving from domestic to wild, what we call “feral.” So are humans.
"By these criteria, some people argue that cats — popular pets worldwide — are not fully domesticated. Cats probably started taming themselves about 9,500 years ago by hunting vermin, infesting early farmers’ grain stores and feasting on food scraps. Farmers brought the mousers with them from the Middle East into Europe around 6,400 years ago, researchers reported June 19 in Nature Ecology & Evolution. But cats may not have been purring lap pets at that time, say molecular biologists Thierry Grange and Eva-Maria Geigl of the Institute Jacques Monod in Paris. That behavioral transformation may have happened later, perhaps in Egyptian cats that were quickly dispersed by boat around the ancient world."
I'll pick up on this in later posts, to get some practical use out of the colony of cats in my household, some feral and some tame, and some still deciding. But “domestication” is not just a matter of calm mammals. The concept can be applied to plants or creatures that were selectively bred to be useful to humans. When we use DNA intervention to change living beings, the changes are abrupt and not necessarily positive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GrDOVPU5p4
This vid is directly about violence. In relation to this talk, I will say that I've never heard of gangs of cats going out to find a cat or kitten to kill. But tomcats will kill and eat kittens.
“In China, people began domesticating the larvae of silk moths for the fine, strong threads of their cocoons as early as 7,500 years ago, genetic evidence suggests. People bred the larvae to produce more silk and to tolerate human handling and extreme crowding (For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese kept their silk-making methods top secret, and smuggling silkworms out of the country was punishable by death. Silk makers traded their monopolized fabric throughout Eurasia along the Silk Road. To this day, the only other insect that is domesticated is the honeybee. — Erika Engelhaupt
This vid is directly about violence. In relation to this talk, I will say that I've never heard of gangs of cats going out to find a cat or kitten to kill. But tomcats will kill and eat kittens.
No comments:
Post a Comment