Science writing, reads like a novel!

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

Dogs, cats, cows, goats, horses, mice--even mice? All were domesticated by mankind. Or more often, domesticated themselves in order to make an easy living off mankind--we may never know for sure.  A certain set of physical and mental changes happened in all these animals--tameness, tolerance for crowding, neoteny, coloration changes, etc.  You wouldn't think just to look at them...but there you have it. Another mammal, the racoon, may be just beginning the process of domesticating itself. Can mankind himself have undergone a similar process, as he learned to live with other humans in larger and larger societies?

Fascinating stuff, I say. He didn't include chickens or other domestic birds, but just doing mammals, gave him a heck of a lot of material to synthesize into a book. And 15 appendices. For a scientist, this guy really likes to write.

It was spiced with anecdotes and material not strictly on topic, but fascinating nonetheless. Like,

Virtually all purebred dogs have a host of genetic ailments, from narcolepsy to skeletal defects. Cancer is also rampant among purebred dogs, occurring at frequencies that in humans would be considered epidemic. Any account of a breed's characteristics includes the defects, including the particular form of cancer to which it is prone.

Why? The kennel club. The mandate of the kennel club was to

"maintain" breed standards through registries. In this it utterly failed. Rather, the effect of the kennel club was to massively scale breed divergence, by means of competitive dog shows, in which the most extreme examples of a given breed type were selectively rewarded and hence selectively bred.

The chapter on raccoons and their early steps to domestication is my favorite. And with humor,

...raccoons may have the most varied diet of any North American mammal. One consumed an entire jar of spicy mustard obtained from my campsite.

And here's a question for you--would you ever have thought of rats or mice as domesticated? Why not?  A few species of them live with man and pretty much can't thrive without him. One definition of domesticate is "to adapt to live with humans."  I guess the body louse goes without saying.

One of his central points is that mankind's unique success among the mammal world lies less to his intelligence than to his cooperativeness. Being smart isn't enough--it's the ability to get together and work on a common goal that made the difference. Another, less central idea (that happened to interest me), is his reminder that often biology follows culture. Consider the reduction in the muscles of the jaw and molar size that occurred after cooking caught on--biological responses to the cultural invention of cooking are examples of biological evolution driven by cultural evolution.

And for a final word of humor,

Brown rats are burrowers; black rats are arboreal and good climbers. If you find a rat in your basement, it is probably a brown rat; if you find one in the attic, it is probably a black rat. If you find an extremely small rat in either place, it is probably a mouse.