One of tenets in a paper by Limor Raviv, Sarah L. Jacobson, Joshua M. Plotnik, and Antonio Benitez-Burraco is that humans comprise one of only a few species that have undergone self-domestication. The researchers include bonobos and elephants in the short list of such species, the latter the subject of their paper “Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.” *
The concept of self-domestication encompasses a species’ evolution toward fewer and less intense incidents of confrontation or aggression. And that surprises me because we “self-domesticated” humans seem to be highly aggressive, what with all the backyard arguments, angry pundits, and, of course wars. I find us highly aggressive as a species; otherwise, how account for the last three millennia of wars and especially the last millennium of wars? In the last thousand years, there is no single year without a war somewhere. There is no single year without unnecessary aggression and killing. Why, just yesterday, I saw a local news report on a gunfight between two neighbors that left one of them dead and the other critically injured. Self-domesticated? The term seems to have little in common with less aggressive behavior.
Nevertheless, those four authors, in looking for human analogs, believe that elephants reveal, for want of a better definition, the peaceful cooperative side of self-domestication. We love human analogs, don’t we? We ascribe human emotions, for example, to our pets. We look to read those emotions into the actions of animals, and we even love cartoon animals that echo human emotions and behaviors. We want the rest of the animal kingdom to see the world through our eyes, but not just our physical eyes, through our perspectives, especially our perspectives of ideals. Sure, we have organized civilizations, and aren’t civilizations evidence of tendencies toward reduced aggression?
But we have not, as those millennia of wars suggest, reduced our aggressive behavior. Our cultures seem to hang, to use the metaphor of Puritan Johnathan Edwards, like a spider on a thread over a fire. It’s a very thin thread, and we’re only fortunate that spider’s silk, our own silk with which we weave the fabric of civilization, is a relatively strong substance that breaks only after we decide to break it and plummet into fiery aggression.
And that’s just the problem with declaring us “self-domesticated.” We can and do decide to break the thread that holds us so tenuously over the fires of anger and aggression. How else account for so many triggered aggressors among us, so many domestic incidences of violence that have spilled into and out of our communities?
The authors of that article believe that human history coupled with the rise in language, led to our supposed self-domestication and lower levels of aggression since the last major glaciation. But is that really so? Haven’t humans of necessity and even during our early hunter-gatherer days been interdependent, as interdependent as lions who share a kill—even if unequally? Here’s what the authors say about domestication among our ancestors:
“Out of the many factors that were suggested to trigger this selection for less aggressive behaviors in humans, the two most prominent explanations for HSD [human self-domestication] are a) changes in our foraging ecology, where humans began relying on more diverse and nonlocal food sources that resulted in a need to move around and/or share resources with others, and b) climate deterioration and harsh environmental conditions during the last glaciation, which have increased the need for exchanging and sharing resources between groups. In both cases, selection for intergroup tolerance and less aggressive individuals would have benefitted the survival of the entire population, and as such may have triggered the process of self-domestication in humans.” (see article)
You buyin’ that? Certainly, we know that children seem to need “domestication practice.” Sharing doesn’t always arise spontaneously among four-year-olds. And even if it did, it doesn’t seem to arise in many adults as evidenced by the empty store shelves just before a coming storm or pandemic. Maybe what the authors believe to be self-domestication is just the status when all things are comfortable and without threat. Yet, even in comfortable times, aggression emerges.
But we are very complex critters. Sometimes in the face of some threat, we see cooperation and mutual compassion dominate. People gather to extricate even strangers from earthquake damaged buildings, wrecked cars, and raging flood waters, for example. At other times threats, even as short-lived as the passing of a snow storm when people run to empty the shelves of products they want to hoard, bring out the aggressor and selfish nature that the authors attribute to our very ancient, preglacial ancestors. Domestication seems to require some overriding authority, and maybe even some overriding punishment-reward system.
And we can see this need for some kind of overriding system even in elephant behavior. During musth, when testosterone levels are high in elephants, males aggressively engage one another, sometimes injuring and even killing. But there are also, the authors point out, incidents of elephants killing rhinos, “this kind of unusually aggressive behavior has been attributed to the lack of ‘mentoring’ by older males and to other trauma-inducing conditions such as poaching, habitat reduction, premature weaning, witness to family deaths, etc.” Think of those toddlers being taught to share, the teaching necessary for “domestication.” Un-mentored young elephants are very much like fatherless teen gang members, operating without compunction or compassion in drive-by shootings. And I guess elephants have their own “snow-storm-run-to-the-grocery-store-mentality-and-behavior” as habitat reduction seems to engender anti-social non-domesticated aggressive behavior.
Intra-species violence? Here the elephants, when not pressured by external factors like poaching and habitat reduction, seem to be aggressive toward one another only during musth. With regard to other kinds of intra-species violence and aggression, the authors write, “Moreover, in wild elephants, no evidence of infanticide has been found.” Whoa! Maybe elephants are more “domesticated” than we are.
Oh! How we self-domesticated humans differ from self-domesticated elephants! Is there a month gone by when we have not read or heard news stories about human adults killing children? Heck, former Virginian governor Ralph Northam argued that post-birth abortion should be considered, and even past President Barack Obama, voting in the Illinois legislature, did not support healthcare for a baby that survived abortion, arguing that providing healthcare to the just born baby would entail making the mother have to rethink her decision about aborting. Self-domesticated? Less aggressive because we self-domesticated? No infanticide among elephants. Infanticide among humans. Is the latter not an act of aggression even without any threat? Or is the baby a threat?
Less aggressive as a function of self-domestication? I think not. At least not among humans.
*See PNAS at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.220860712 and https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208607120
The concept of self-domestication encompasses a species’ evolution toward fewer and less intense incidents of confrontation or aggression. And that surprises me because we “self-domesticated” humans seem to be highly aggressive, what with all the backyard arguments, angry pundits, and, of course wars. I find us highly aggressive as a species; otherwise, how account for the last three millennia of wars and especially the last millennium of wars? In the last thousand years, there is no single year without a war somewhere. There is no single year without unnecessary aggression and killing. Why, just yesterday, I saw a local news report on a gunfight between two neighbors that left one of them dead and the other critically injured. Self-domesticated? The term seems to have little in common with less aggressive behavior.
Nevertheless, those four authors, in looking for human analogs, believe that elephants reveal, for want of a better definition, the peaceful cooperative side of self-domestication. We love human analogs, don’t we? We ascribe human emotions, for example, to our pets. We look to read those emotions into the actions of animals, and we even love cartoon animals that echo human emotions and behaviors. We want the rest of the animal kingdom to see the world through our eyes, but not just our physical eyes, through our perspectives, especially our perspectives of ideals. Sure, we have organized civilizations, and aren’t civilizations evidence of tendencies toward reduced aggression?
But we have not, as those millennia of wars suggest, reduced our aggressive behavior. Our cultures seem to hang, to use the metaphor of Puritan Johnathan Edwards, like a spider on a thread over a fire. It’s a very thin thread, and we’re only fortunate that spider’s silk, our own silk with which we weave the fabric of civilization, is a relatively strong substance that breaks only after we decide to break it and plummet into fiery aggression.
And that’s just the problem with declaring us “self-domesticated.” We can and do decide to break the thread that holds us so tenuously over the fires of anger and aggression. How else account for so many triggered aggressors among us, so many domestic incidences of violence that have spilled into and out of our communities?
The authors of that article believe that human history coupled with the rise in language, led to our supposed self-domestication and lower levels of aggression since the last major glaciation. But is that really so? Haven’t humans of necessity and even during our early hunter-gatherer days been interdependent, as interdependent as lions who share a kill—even if unequally? Here’s what the authors say about domestication among our ancestors:
“Out of the many factors that were suggested to trigger this selection for less aggressive behaviors in humans, the two most prominent explanations for HSD [human self-domestication] are a) changes in our foraging ecology, where humans began relying on more diverse and nonlocal food sources that resulted in a need to move around and/or share resources with others, and b) climate deterioration and harsh environmental conditions during the last glaciation, which have increased the need for exchanging and sharing resources between groups. In both cases, selection for intergroup tolerance and less aggressive individuals would have benefitted the survival of the entire population, and as such may have triggered the process of self-domestication in humans.” (see article)
You buyin’ that? Certainly, we know that children seem to need “domestication practice.” Sharing doesn’t always arise spontaneously among four-year-olds. And even if it did, it doesn’t seem to arise in many adults as evidenced by the empty store shelves just before a coming storm or pandemic. Maybe what the authors believe to be self-domestication is just the status when all things are comfortable and without threat. Yet, even in comfortable times, aggression emerges.
But we are very complex critters. Sometimes in the face of some threat, we see cooperation and mutual compassion dominate. People gather to extricate even strangers from earthquake damaged buildings, wrecked cars, and raging flood waters, for example. At other times threats, even as short-lived as the passing of a snow storm when people run to empty the shelves of products they want to hoard, bring out the aggressor and selfish nature that the authors attribute to our very ancient, preglacial ancestors. Domestication seems to require some overriding authority, and maybe even some overriding punishment-reward system.
And we can see this need for some kind of overriding system even in elephant behavior. During musth, when testosterone levels are high in elephants, males aggressively engage one another, sometimes injuring and even killing. But there are also, the authors point out, incidents of elephants killing rhinos, “this kind of unusually aggressive behavior has been attributed to the lack of ‘mentoring’ by older males and to other trauma-inducing conditions such as poaching, habitat reduction, premature weaning, witness to family deaths, etc.” Think of those toddlers being taught to share, the teaching necessary for “domestication.” Un-mentored young elephants are very much like fatherless teen gang members, operating without compunction or compassion in drive-by shootings. And I guess elephants have their own “snow-storm-run-to-the-grocery-store-mentality-and-behavior” as habitat reduction seems to engender anti-social non-domesticated aggressive behavior.
Intra-species violence? Here the elephants, when not pressured by external factors like poaching and habitat reduction, seem to be aggressive toward one another only during musth. With regard to other kinds of intra-species violence and aggression, the authors write, “Moreover, in wild elephants, no evidence of infanticide has been found.” Whoa! Maybe elephants are more “domesticated” than we are.
Oh! How we self-domesticated humans differ from self-domesticated elephants! Is there a month gone by when we have not read or heard news stories about human adults killing children? Heck, former Virginian governor Ralph Northam argued that post-birth abortion should be considered, and even past President Barack Obama, voting in the Illinois legislature, did not support healthcare for a baby that survived abortion, arguing that providing healthcare to the just born baby would entail making the mother have to rethink her decision about aborting. Self-domesticated? Less aggressive because we self-domesticated? No infanticide among elephants. Infanticide among humans. Is the latter not an act of aggression even without any threat? Or is the baby a threat?
Less aggressive as a function of self-domestication? I think not. At least not among humans.
*See PNAS at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.220860712 and https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208607120
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