How to Domesticate a Human Male, or Maybe Why Not To

Have you ever stopped to gawk at some strange dog breed, wondering “How the heck did those things survive in the wild?”

Then you may remember that for modern dog breeds, human civilization actually is “the wild.”

I find myself wondering about this a lot. Where do pets fit in the modern urban ecosystem? For example, could chihuahuas be considered parasites? Do they offer something to their owners to counterbalance their cost in pet food, plus the dim annoyance they seem to universally cause non-chihuahua owners?

(I have much more positive feelings for less inbred dog breeds — those that seem like they could hack it in the wild without human providers.)

But maybe my thinking here is screwy. After all, could I hack it in the wild?

Is the ability to go feral a legitimate requirement for respect as a species?

I’m starting to think not.

I’ve recently been reading a book called Domesticated. It’s an evolutionary history of domesticated animals, covering better-known stories like “wolves turning into dogs” and less familiar transitions like “aurochs turning into cows.” (You don’t know what an auroch is? Don’t feel bad; they’re extinct. But only recently.)

I’m not finished with the book yet, but already it has held more than a few surprises:

1. How large the number of domesticated animal species is, and how linked they’ve been with the ascendance of humans to Species Numero Uno on Earth. Humans and dogs aren’t quite as vital to each other as bees are to flowering plants…but there’s an analogy to be made. (Don’t believe me? Ask the people who go to dog parks to scout for romantic partners.)
2. Despite a long history of domestication, most domestic species maintain quite a bit of kissin’-cousin cross-breeding with wild populations. This means the gene population fine-tuned for human purposes gets re-sprinkled with wildness every now and then. And vice-versa. Domesticated animals who “go feral” add civilization-optimized genetic signatures into wild populations.
3. Only in the past 150 years or so have domesticated animals been rigorously, proactively bred to “push” certain traits — and had their breeding controlled to prevent the “leaking in” of wild counterpart genes. A lot of this has happened since the advent of dog shows, horse shows, and similar competitions. The Result: Many of the most “exotic” breeds of domestic animals are brand spankin’ new from an evolutionary perspective. (This seems to make “exotic” a misleading word, implying these breeds are from somewhere geographically distinct. In fact, they’re just new inventions.)

For domesticated animals, this has worked out extremely well.

Despite the extinction of cow-ancestor aurochs, there are hundreds of millions of cows alive today that wouldn’t be here were it not for their utility to humans. You may not envy cows, but from a rationalist biological perspective, they’re a very successful species.

For animals that are pets, it gets even better.

We no longer expect house cats to carry their weight economically — even though their proto-domesticated ancestors were integrated into human environments precisely because of their usefulness in keeping down rodent populations.

Nowadays, cats are bred for cuteness, for their snug fit in soft human laps, for their propensity to zany antics in YouTube videos.

I’d love to ask philosopher David Pearce what he thinks about this, but it seems to me that we may be breeding pets that “default to happy” more than would ever have happened in the tooth-and-claw natural selection of a wilderness environment. Modern housecats don’t need to be anxiously on guard for predators; they need to enjoy pen-lasers and look cute while stretching in sunbeams.

(Do I sound a little jealous of cats? Actually, yes. But I’m as much of a sucker for them as anyone, and I’ll include a photo as proof.)

One of several cats I support, despite his unimpressive resumé.

But domestication — happening as it did over thousands of animal generations — wasn’t a goal-directed activity. It happened in phases. The first wild cats to stray into human villages didn’t anticipate YouTube stardom. They were there because humans’ grain storage unwittingly created an ideal ecological magnet for furry little mammals who love to eat grain.

You know those sucker-fish that live on the backs of whales, vacuuming off the bacterial scum? Whales are more than willing to put up with them (even if it tickles sometimes). So it was with village-dwelling humans and pre-domestication cats. Cats with the genetic cojones to suppress their fear of us big bipeds had better access to rodent buffets, and soon the “humans don’t scare me” genes began to out-compete other genes in the cat breeding pool.

In other words, long before humans were domesticating cats, cats were domesticating cats.

Humans just happened to open up a new ecological niche — mouse-magnet granaries — that the wild housecat-ancestors could exploit.

Supernormal stimuli

Imagine yourself as a wild cat 9,000 years ago.

You took a wrong turn and found yourself on the outskirts of a human village, when suddenly a couple of big, scary humans are wandering back into the village, cutting off your best escape route.

You high-tail it away, running further into the village, ducking in the shadows to hide in the first place you find…

It turns out to be a primitive grain silo.

Your fuzzy jaw hits the floor. This is a rodent smorgasbord. Mice in droves, bellies stuffed on grain: fat, slow and unsuspecting. You pinch yourself to see if you’re cat-dreaming…But no — this is real.

So you do what any cat would do. You quickly dispatch a few mice — not taking the time to torment them as they die, because you want to kill even more before they scatter. A mousing opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime.

What you’ve just experienced is a supernormal stimulus.

More delectable food, more easily acquired, than your cat brain had any reason to expect would ever happen in a million years. Supernormal stimuli is basically a scientific term for “kid in a candy store” or “winning the freakin’ lottery.”

Stumbling onto repeated access to the same supernormal stimuli, it’s hard not to go a little wild.

But in the cats-mice-granaries example, this going wild is exactly the tendency that would lead cats to eventually go tame…

Now let’s switch species…

An 11-year-old boy living 20,000 years ago had zero reason to expect any sexual interest from the sexiest woman in his tribe.

She was most likely the chief’s woman, someone to fantasize about from afar. Seeing her in flagrante delicto — had the opportunity ever presented itself — would probably have been by sneak-a-peeking through the darkened slats of a yurt and (let’s face it) mostly just getting a view of the chief’s ass.

What wouldn’t have happened to our ancestral 11-year-old is easy access to scores of copulating adults — the most attractive bunch from a dozen tribes in all directions — perfectly lit for viewing in crystal clarity, all more than happy to have him watch.

This too (like the cat in mouse-heaven) counts as a supernormal stimulus.

And like the wild cat stupefied by his good fortune, so are modern human kids by today’s Internet.

The unfathomable sea of digital sex-signals is more than our brains were evolved to handle.

(I had a friend tell me back in 1996, “I’ve seen all the porn on the Internet.” He was lying then, and that was 20 years ago.)

Supernormal stimuli — when they’re not short-lived flukes — can lead to strange no-man’s-lands of evolutionary divergence. The cats who braved human villages to gain access to rodent smorgasbords also had to deal with dogs (who were domesticated first, it turns out).

Novel opportunities often hide unforeseen problems.

So it is with high-bandwidth porn. In an almost textbook example of too much of a good thing, today’s “digital native” generation is growing up in a new ecosystem where access to sexual rewards is no longer limited by age, social status, physical attractiveness, athletic ability, or even interpersonal social skills. All the checkpoints to on-demand, sex-triggered dopamine release all just disappeared (poof!). In an evolutionary eye-blink.

It should be no surprise there are unforeseen consequences.

And in some cases — no less than a cat stumbling across his first village dog — they can be tragic.

Gary Wilson, author of Your Brain on Porn, has done extensive research on the digital-age epidemic of sexual dysfunction in today’s increasingly at-risk population — i.e. pretty much anyone with an Internet connection.

Especially endangered are teenage boys in their sexually formative years. This is a demographic long famous for sexual fiascos — but erectile dysfunction hasn’t traditionally been among them. Unfortunately, that’s changing.

What’s most surprising is that this probably shouldn’t be surprising.

All the sexual stimulation we want, whenever we want it…

What could possibly go wrong?

Are omnipresent porn and tough-to-impress penises just another step in the self-domestication of Homo Sapiens? Is this only a further decoupling of sexual pleasure from reproductive necessity — like hormonal birth control was a few decades back?

Maaaaybe.

But I can’t help but think of a wild cat, squinting his feline eyes in contempt at a purebred Persian who is content to purr in a human owner’s soft lap.

And I think that evolution has a long way to go before Homo Sapiens women will be equally content with human males whose laps remain soft, despite their best efforts.

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This article was written by Jesse Lawler and originally appeared as part of the Smart Drug Smarts Brain Breakfast newsletter.