You can breed wild foxes into dogs in just a handful of generations. Ten thousand years is a very long time. It is unlikely that the traits that were most useful to neolithic nomads were the same that maximize reproductive success for medieval peasants or oriental aristocrats.
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Replying to @Plinz
True but dogs have a wide range of genetic deficiencies, and that was only "achieved" through tyrrany. We as humans don't arbitrarily engineer for specific traits so perhaps it's more of a mellowing.
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Replying to @Shoseki
This is simply not true. Throughout history, societies have very deliberately influenced which behaviors were rewarded with opportunities to feed and secure offspring and which did not. Families and individuals were deliberately selecting partners for their heritable traits, etc.
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Replying to @Plinz
I might be completely off base but my understanding was that agriculture and society *centralised* breeding opportunities, meaning that the "owners" were ultra successful and the worker males disproportionately unsuccessful.
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Replying to @Shoseki
Not really, because until quite recently, the success of the aristocracy depended on the toils of a much larger general population that had to work on the fields, fight wars and so on. Good and obedient serfs had to raise a lot of children to keep the children of the courts fed.
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Not a lot of sophisticated mate selection going on there, though.
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Replying to @RitaJKing @Shoseki
Are you kidding? How did it escape your attention that the most important individual topic in human cognition, art and literature is mate selection?
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Replying to @Plinz @RitaJKing
I thought the most important individual topics were "who are we, where did we come from, what should we do?"
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Replying to @Shoseki @RitaJKing
Yes, and they tend to be proxy questions for “why don’t you love me?”, and generally only asked by those who are not already busy with making love. :)
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