domesticated

It's not even clear that man domesticated cat. It seems more likely the other way around.

I bet there will be farms and domesticated animals soon, because after all "who wants to hunt and forage all day?" .

She is, in this sense, completely "domesticated." She actually laps up the fact she's a pet of her government's press.

The same thing happened when the Russians domesticated silver foxes[1][2]. Humans are subject to a lot of these effects.

People had no idea how animals worked inside when they domesticated them, that in no way prevented dogs from being useful.

You can breed varieties, crossing wild populations with domesticated ones, and then add in a transgene at the end. This doesn't undo the diversity you've added through wide crosses beforehand.

Because of how domesticated bananas are reproduced, it's a good lesson on the problems with monoculture.

The same is true of most human domesticated species, most of which are effectively genetically engineered through ages of selective breeding. Picture dogs vs wolves, cows vs wild buffalo, etc.

Do you think domesticated animals and scavengers are going to make up for the lost in biodiversity and ecological damage? Basically whatever can survive in our concrete jungles and farms will be alright, screw the rest?

The only reason you can train a dog, and the reason that dogs were ever successfully domesticated in the first place, is that they have an inbuilt desire to be cooperative and to submit to the authority of a more powerful "dog". The dog is happy when you're happy with it, and sad when you're angry at it.

Grapes have been domesticated for thousands of years, and at every step the goal has been to maximize fructose and minimize fiber, most notably in making the seedless varieties that comprise the vast majority of table grapes sold today. At this point, who knows what grapes were originally like?

If you are concerned about genetically modified foods, you should probably also be concerned with domesticated foods, since those have been selected by their farmers for many generations to produce specific things - bigger fruits, better tasting meats. We've been doing genetic modification since we started farming.

] Successive generations of domesticated animals exhibit reduced brain volume in comparison with their ancestors. The assumption that assimilation into the group is always good ignores the flip side of cooperation among prosocials.

Turns out: * Practically 100% of US honeybees are domesticated; wild honeybees were wiped out in the late 80s by mites. * Honeybees aren't native to the US; I'm not sure if I heard this right, but it may be that none of the social bees are. * Colony collapse is largely a phenomenon observed during overwintering. Some 15% of domesticated colonies fail over the winter.

Turns out: * Practically 100% of US honeybees are domesticated; wild honeybees were wiped out in the late 80s by Varroa mites. * Honeybees aren't native to the US; I'm not sure if I heard this right, but it may be that none of the social bees are. * Colony collapse is largely a phenomenon observed during overwintering. Some 15% of domesticated colonies fail over the winter.

I realise that domestication will have changed animals and their environmental responses, but I find it very hard to believe that dogs or cats would have developed emotions from scratch in the ~10,000 years since they were domesticated. In my experience, those who claim animals don't have emotions are usually justifying some kind of behaviour; in one case, it was a hunter, and another, someone who was generally unpleasant and cruel to animals.

Here's my new favourite example for this recent evolution, a paper showing that when we domesticated dogs, their genetic makeup changed to accommodate for a starch-rich diet as shared with humans. >The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet [1] >Nineteen of these regions contain genes important in brain function, eight of which belong to nervous system development pathways and potentially underlie behavioural changes central to dog domestication6.

I'm reading Guns, germs and steel, and it notes one advantage of European civilization was that it had access to large mammals that were easily domesticated, and one of the ways in which they were easy to domesticate was that they are hierarchically organized socially, and "follow the leader". This helps, because humans just needed to insert themselves at the top of the hierarchy to control the herd/pack. I'd realized some time ago that we ourselves are also domesticated, but just this morning, in watching a dog cross the road following its owner, I realized that human beings themselves are socially hierarchical, and this makes us easier to domesticate, and easier to control.

One thing that people often remark on is how they're often in the middle of nowhere, but when they were built they were often in clearings in dense forests, but over time as we domesticated animals that would feed on the bark, killing the trees, then eat the new shoots, over many centuries - millennia - we deforested, for example the moors, and the megalithic sites became elegant monuments to a forgotten age, standing proud against a bleak landscape.