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Jeremy Taylor quotes Richard Wrangham on the domestication of human beings
I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves. If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior. And the amazing thing once you start thinking in those terms is that you realize that we're still moving fast. I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves. The way it's happening is the way it's probably happened since we became permanently settled in villages, 20 or 30,000 years ago, or before.
That's from Taylor's interesting new book Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human. Taylor does stress that this hypothesis is speculation rather than established fact.
By the way, our skulls are becoming thinner, a process known as gracilization.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 14, 2009 at 09:24 AM in Books, Science | Permalink
Comments
As Stephen Jay Gould emphasized, neoteny - retaining juvenile features in the adult - is a potent evolutionary motif. It is one of the most persistent themes in human evolution, but contrary to Wrangham, it has been accompanied by an extraordinary increase in brain size, the very increase that distinguishes us from the other great apes.
Posted by: capitalistimperialistpig at Nov 14, 2009 9:36:13 AM
If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior.
THAT explains why my kids still seem like adolescents in their twenties and thirties!
Posted by: anon at Nov 14, 2009 9:44:42 AM
We domesticated ourselves. Doesn't that mean we should be looking for parallels with cats rather than with dogs?
Posted by: David Heigham at Nov 14, 2009 10:18:47 AM
"rain size is falling": bloody hell, it's Global Drizzling.
Posted by: dearieme at Nov 14, 2009 10:37:47 AM
I think we'll find that the social aspect of evolution is what made us unique, with such qualities as empathy, being able to place ourselves in someone else's shoes, and compassion, which made the individual more likely to succeed over temporary setbacks within a group, whereas hunting alone out on the plain was, evolutionarily speaking, a way to get, or keep, a head.
Posted by: Bill at Nov 14, 2009 10:39:32 AM
oh great! trepanation is getting easier!
Posted by: babar at Nov 14, 2009 10:45:13 AM
Bill,
Primitive humans usually hunt in groups, like dogs,lions or chimps, especially when after big game. Hunting tends to be a cooperative activity - even today, when high powered weapons make us more than a match for the most formidable predators and prey.
A primitive hunter who hunted alone would have little chance against a big game animal, and even if he did get a deer would be very likely to lose it to big cats, wolves, or other apex predators.
Posted by: capitalistimperialistpig at Nov 14, 2009 10:59:02 AM
This is an old thesis: See John Livingston's Rogue Primate for a self-hating version of it.
http://www.amazon.com/Rogue-Primate-Exploration-Human-Domestication/dp/1570980586
Posted by: andrew potter at Nov 14, 2009 11:00:42 AM
Neoteny is what has enabled us, as humans, to find novel solutions to complex problems. Unlike other species, we still engage in play as adults. This has been a positive force more often than a negative one.
Posted by: Karen at Nov 14, 2009 3:34:50 PM
@capitalimpiralistpig, I agree with you. That was the point. You didn't survive alone; you survived in groups. I see that the last sentence missed the "not" after the phrase "plains was".
Posted by: Bill at Nov 14, 2009 4:43:24 PM
Cochran and Harpending wrote a great book recently on the theme of recent human evolution, with genetic and other evidence, that uses the metaphor of domestication too.
The 10,000 Year Explosion.
Posted by: agnostic at Nov 14, 2009 4:52:01 PM
It's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves
It's not really about taming, it's about outsourcing. Or prosthetics, if you like. For any many abilities, it's cheaper (more adaptive) to build outside the body (if you are able to) than to grow as part of the body. So, evolutionarily speaking, it's cheaper to have cutting tools and cooked food than bigger teeth and jaws and a heavier-duty digestive system. It's more adaptive to be able to make clothes than have to grow and shed fur. Weapons (especially those that can be deployed from a distance) are cheaper and more effective than tooth, claw, and muscles. And so on.
BUT we have to keep in mind that sexual selection is pushing in the opposite direction. There's little doubt that, all other things being equal, women prefer taller men. Until the last few generations, natural selection (food supply) restrained that preference. But the restraints of limited food are gone for a large fraction of the world's population, and average heights have been increasing rapidly in those places. Is it all diet? Or is sexual selection playing some role too (if it isn't yet, it seems like eventually it must).
Posted by: Slocum at Nov 14, 2009 5:18:03 PM
Humans taming humans makes a lot of sense to me. Particularly if the context is dance. You need something to drive the process that compels brain growth. The driver has to be intense.
See http://bit.ly/tUzYF for additional thoughts regarding neoteny and taming.
Posted by: Andrew Lehman at Nov 15, 2009 7:32:34 AM
The book "What are you optimistic about?" provides further evidence that we're taming ourselves.
A number of scientists (mostly from the hard sciences) were asked what made them optimistic. Several gave the same answer: levels of physical violence were decreasing dramatically in human societies. The percentage of people that fought, had been in fist fights, killed, etc. had declined dramatically in the last couple of hundred years.
And, even though the 20th century was the most violent on record--100-150 million violent deaths, if I am remembering correctly--if stone age or medieval rates had continued, the total number of violent deaths in the 20th century would have been closer to 2 billion.
Posted by: alex at Nov 15, 2009 8:52:20 AM
Great! In 20,000 years we will all look and act like poodles. Oh, wait...
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Nov 15, 2009 12:27:06 PM
I predict that humans will not continue the trend toward physical neoteny. Rather genetic engineering will step in and result in ridiculous levels of sexual dimorphism.
The next couple centuries are going to show more humans deciding what traits they want, and getting them. So, we'll see sexual selection without having to find a compromise between sexiness and survivability. There also won't be a compromise between having more masculine daughters for having more masculine sons.
Posted by: kevin at Nov 15, 2009 6:28:34 PM
"oh great! trepanation is getting easier!"
Those tribesmen who could be trepanned easily would have the evil spirits let out of their heads, and so survive to have many children.
It's logical really.
Posted by: doctorpat at Nov 15, 2009 9:24:12 PM
What drove human planetary develoment was incresingly effective investment in children.
The resulting output gap with symbiotic systems temporarily allowed agency to intervene, and pull development backwards, for the purpose of controlling future cash flows, immediate consumption by controlling interests.
While the less capable children tolerated this development, the more talented children of natural selection have been re-wiring their minds logically, then breeding in the result, for three generations now.
The latter are off building the next economy, while the older generations are dependent on their own creations left behind, now that all the bills, with interest and penalties, for that intervention are due.
Nothing stops evolution. We serve at the pleasure of the universe, or not at all, and the universe is well equiped to outlast irrational institutional markets. In fact, it reles upon them, to create the necessary current to train its prospects.
Fish don't swim upstream to mate by accident.
Posted by: kevinearick at Nov 15, 2009 11:08:27 PM
There are profound echoes of Nietzsche here, in the content and even the name of the "genealogy of morals". Nietzsche viewed the process as taking place solely on the moral/social level, but I'm sure he would have been just as happy to see it happening on the genetic level -- after all, he viewed it as a genealogical process. Maybe this will be a good opportunity for Alex and Tyler to add Nietzsche to the list of philosophers discussed in the blog.
Posted by: Asher at Nov 16, 2009 2:24:03 AM
I wish people would be more careful to separate the past and the future in these discussions.
That we evolved in response to agriculture etc seems undeniable. And this is very recent history, evolutionary speaking. It is possibly even the present, in some (poor) parts of the world. (I'll second the recommendation of "The 10,000 Year Explosion".)
But the present and future which most of us (in the rich world) imagine is very very different. For instance wealth and children are now anti-correlated. Discussing this is a bit sci-fi for my taste, but perhaps not yours. But whatever you do, please don't muddle it up with the past!
Posted by: improbable at Nov 16, 2009 8:19:50 AM
Does this mean the world described in 'Idiocracy' is coming?
Posted by: JMC at Nov 16, 2009 5:26:41 PM
kevinearick, you talk like a precocious 14 year old who just discovered Atlas Shrugged, and I'm 90% certain you're a troll, but I'll bite.
There's no evidence that human evolution is seriously diverging in any sense of the word, and certainly not on those terms. While genetics can, observably, give one an edge in performing certain, general tasks, highly specific behaviors like the ability to manage a business, play the piano, or figure out math aren't written into your genes. Even if you have some hitherto unknown genetic 'boost,' we know from child development that this isn't enough: you require the correct stimuli during development for this to manifest. Similarly, humans have high brain plasticity, and regardless of what your parents did for a living, unless you have a severe disability it seems you can learn to do most anything with the proper education. After all, I'm a mathematician and my parents are/were lawyers, but their parents were poor farmers. I didn't inherit magical genes; I went to university.
It's pretty obvious which side of this elusive divide you think you're on, but the fact of the matter is that to my knowledge science hasn't found anything to support the supposed superiority of some humans over others.
Posted by: Chris at Nov 20, 2009 6:27:55 PM
JMC- 'Idiocracy' is here, it is now, it is rampant in the USA:
The herd bellow in distracted, electrolyte-swilling UFC bloodlust as Goldman Sachs dictate self-serving economic policy. Retarded and reactionary media mobilize 'teabaggers' to cry out for the cutting of their own throats. The oligarchs heartily applaud the dimwitted masses who perform these self-destructive spectacles of buffoonery.
Posted by: Freddy Nietszche at Nov 21, 2009 3:14:30 AM
