![]() ![]() marriage regulation, prohibition of infanticide) could also have had selective effects, and was thus anticipating concepts like cultural niche construction, which would later prove crucial for understanding human evolution. Notably, Boas argued that various social laws and prohibitions (e.g. Specifically, Boas suggested that in both cases, traits like de-pigmentation, shortening of the face, and the loss of reproductive periodicity were partially the result of a more protective environment and a diet of softened, processed food. Decades later, Boas (1938) observed that many of these traits were also shared by humans, and suggested that this was due to similar selective pressures. That said, Darwin’s study of domesticated species recognized the package of traits that many mammalian domesticated species share, which includes morphological traits such as skeletal changes (shorter muzzle, decreased heart size, reduced teeth size, short and curly tail, floppy ears), physiological traits such as altered and usually more numerous reproductive cycles, and the retention of many juvenile behavioral features. No race or body of men has been so completely subjugated by other men, as that certain individuals should be preserved, and thus unconsciously selected, from somehow excelling in utility to their masters.” ( Darwin, 1871, pp. “It is, nevertheless, an error to speak of man, even if we look only to the conditions to which he has been exposed, as ‘far more domesticated’ man differs widely from any strictly domesticated animal for his breeding has never long been controlled, either by methodical or unconscious selection. While he conceded that humans are similar to domesticates in exhibiting extreme phenotypic variability, he nonetheless argued that the term domestication would be misapplied in the case of human evolution: ![]() It was Darwin who first critically discussed self-domestication from an evolutionary perspective. This stain on the intellectual history of human domestication theories illustrates the complex social meanings of the concept, and its consequent ambiguity when used in explaining human evolutionary processes. Coupled with the tradition of differentiating human cultures on the basis of the extent to which they were “domesticated,” much literature on the subject promoted views of social hierarchies in civility, which were later used as a pseudo-scientific rationale for racist and eugenic political movements (reviewed in Brüne, 2007). It was common for writings on the subject to be entangled with various value judgments, with some considering the superiority of a domesticated state, while others described it as a kind of physical and mental degeneration. Since antiquity, scholars have described humans (in general or in reference to their own particular culture) as domesticated, which generally referred to their “civility”: their distance from a wild or savage state of being. The notion that humans are “domesticated” far precedes the notion that humans have evolved. This account further illustrates the significant differences between humans and domesticates, thus challenging the notion of human self-domestication. ![]() The second stage followed the emergence of language, when individuals began to instruct the imagination of their interlocutors, and to rely even more extensively on emotional plasticity and culturally learned emotional control. The first stage, which followed the emergence of mimetic communication, the beginnings of musical engagement, and mimesis-related cognition, required socially mediated emotional plasticity and was accompanied by new social emotions. In the second part, we discuss the unique aspects of human evolution and propose that emotional control and social motivation in humans evolved during two major, partially overlapping stages. In the first part of the paper we highlight general features of human social evolution, which, we argue, is more similar to that of other social mammals than to that of mammalian domesticates and is therefore incompatible with the notion of human self-domestication. Here, we extend previous proposals and suggest that what underlies human social evolution is selection for socially mediated emotional control and plasticity. The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that, like mammalian domesticates, humans have gone through a process of selection against aggression – a process that in the case of humans was self-induced. 3Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS), London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom.2The Department of Communication, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel. ![]()
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