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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that's a quite famous experiment, and still ongoing. Similar effects of "domestication syndrome" have recently been reported in wild urban foxes and raccoons.

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Remember reading something about humans themselves show the signs of domestication syndrome.

Not in the literal sense (which would semantically impossible), but we have domesticated ourselves with the advent of farming and the domestication of crop plants. We fundamentally changed our own lifestyle into an agricultural one, the same we changed lifestyle of several large mammal species to co-exist with us in that agricultural lifestyle. So perhaps in some sense, maybe we actually did literally domesticated ourselves.

Wheat, barley and similar plant life have done pretty well for themselves, perhaps they domesticated us?

A chicken is an egg’s way of making more eggs.

The markers of domestication in modern humans long predate the farming. 'Human' was the first animal available for domestication. There is a distinction between the domestication as set of changes in the organism and the 'applied' domestication in farming. In the applied sense, the humans on the top of the hierarchy do actually farm the humans below them.

> Not in the literal sense (which would semantically impossible)

Why is it impossible the humans are not domesticated? Are you making a point about language?

I think this is certainly true. People in cities, where there are high amounts of people around act differently when they are in a small village or in nature with fewer or no people around.

Executing murderers will change the population over a few centuries.

Yes, executioners do proliferate this way. They tend to run out of murderers quickly though, then use any other excuses to execute.

Only if they haven't yet reproduced.

I doubt it. The fraction of population that is murderers is quite small.

It is now. OTOH I have read that an estimated 1/4 of male chimpanzees die at the hands of other chimps (whether murder or war). So it’s not implausible.

If so, you don't have to execute a lot of them to affect the murder rates!

The question wasn't changing the murder rate now, but changing "the population over a few centuries". If it doesn't change the population genetics significantly it won't do that.

If 1% of men are potential murderers, and we execute 10% of them in each generation, it will have huge a impact on the murder rate over a few centuries, even though not a lot of people got executed, and the overall genetics of the population hasn't changed much.

Well, no, that presumes "murderosity" is due to rare genes concentrated in murderers, not unfortunate combinations of genes widely spread in the population. Experience with "disease genes" has been they mostly of the latter type, with each gene having a minor effect.

The rate of the effect is probably unknowable. I think we agree that it exists.

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