Richard C. Francis - Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World

Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World
by Richard C Francis
Read by Eric Martin

Without our domesticated plants and animals, human civilization as we know it would not exist.

We would still be living at subsistence level as hunter-gatherers if not for domestication. It is no accident that the cradle of civilization the Middle East is where sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and cats commenced their fatefully intimate association with humans.

Before the agricultural revolution, there were perhaps 10 million humans on earth. Now there are over 7 billion. Moreover, our domesticated species, in stark contrast to their wild ancestors, have also thrived. In a human-constructed environment or man-made world it pays to be domesticated. In fact, many domesticated species initiated the process of domestication by choosing to live near human settlements. This self-domestication was particularly important during the early stages of the wolf-to-dog transition.

Richard Francis's mission in the pages of this book is to explain how the domestication process works. He accomplishes this by focusing on our favorite domesticated species dogs, cats, horses, all the way to reindeer.

Domestication is an evolutionary process driven by both natural and artificial selection. The primary trait under selection is tameness, the capacity to tolerate close human proximity. But selection for tameness results in a host of seemingly unrelated by-products, from floppy ears to changes in coloration to skeletal alterations. It s a package deal known as the domestication syndrome. We humans, too, show signs of the domestication syndrome, which some believe was key to our evolutionary success. By this view, human evolution parallels the evolution of dogs from wolves, in particular.

Elements of the domestication syndrome can be found in every domesticated species―not only cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, cattle, and horses but also more recent human creations, such as domesticated camels, reindeer, and laboratory rats. That domestication results in this suite of changes in such a wide variety of mammals is a fascinating evolutionary story, one that sheds much light on the evolutionary process in general.

A natural storyteller, Francis weaves history, archaeology, and anthropology to create a fascinating narrative while seamlessly integrating the most cutting-edge ideas in twenty-first-century biology, from genomics to evo-devo.