Human Self-domestication

That probably deserves a second think: that's probably how HIV spread from monkeys to humans.

Primates are dangerous even when they don't attack you.
 
When I was a teen we would watch action movies on VHS, and it seemed that fighting would be something we'd be expected to do occasionally as adults. But as the decades pass I have grown older, and I've started to realize that the people who get into fights, show up at the emergency room with damage -its normally the same group of men. There seems to be a subculture or social strata where it is an acceptable means of conflict resolution or status-adjuster.

This is also the same group of people that suffers by far the most attrition due to drugs and car accidents. I imagine if this was a high-crime country they'd manage to get in trouble that way too. Although I'd expect more short-term successes as well.

But really, its a fast-breeder strategy versus a slow-breeder one. Be full of fire and passion and spread your seed. And die young. (Most of the people I know in the fighting subculture have accumulated damage by now. I can't imagine them surviving in a more primal setting like that). Or have a few kids less born, but raise them well with good resources. As society settles more, the second strategy will have marginally more kids surviving to adulthood I suspect.
 
Those are all very helpful insights.
A silly example, I know, but your post prompted me to look back on my recent viewing of the latest Martin Scorsese film, "The Irishman". The "mob" culture is built on violence and intimidation as well as manipulation of man's baser instincts and desires no matter the ethnic group involved. Yet even in that culture the overly aggressive and reckless are ostracized and even killed eventually. That's why "Crazy Joe" Gallo was gunned down in a restaurant in downtown New York. It happened to many others. They endanger the group. The characters even used your word to describe him: hothead.
The ones who survived into old age were the calm, controlled, even icy ones.
I saw that movie the other day, it was great. That's a good point. Over aggression is a lack of discipline. Humans actually became more proficient at violence through "self-domestication", because discipline and cooperation, led to armies.
 
Those are all very helpful insights.

A silly example, I know, but your post prompted me to look back on my recent viewing of the latest Martin Scorsese film, "The Irishman". The "mob" culture is built on violence and intimidation as well as manipulation of man's baser instincts and desires no matter the ethnic group involved. Yet even in that culture the overly aggressive and reckless are ostracized and even killed eventually. That's why "Crazy Joe" Gallo was gunned down in a restaurant in downtown New York. It happened to many others. They endanger the group. The characters even used your word to describe him: hothead.

The ones who survived into old age were the calm, controlled, even icy ones.
 
Unfortunately, because of my career, I've been around more than my fair share of really violent men. Seeing the aftermatch is horrifying, and disturbing, but to see it in action is also frightening as hell. There's nothing glamorous or attractive about it.

I've only ever seen my husband in a fight twice. Once was because someone started bothering me in the street. It was Mardis Gras, we'd been diverted to New Orleans, you can guess the rest. Another time I was picking him up from his summer job on a construction site and he was fighting some idiot who had started up with him because he was the boss' soon to be son-in-law. I absolutely hated it. All of a sudden it was as if I didn't know him. Don't get me wrong: he wasn't the type to get into fights on a regular basis. He said that even growing up in a rough neighborhood other guys didn't mess with him because he was always big for his age, a football player and wrestler, etc., but he'd had to deal with situations like that from time to time.

Yet, in much of the world, and even here in the U.S. in some areas what is upsetting for us is the norm. People see violence every day. That's what I think of when I see the newsreels and photos: how must it have felt, how often did they have nightmares about it, how many people's lives are permanently scarred by it.

So, I'm all for domestication. Yes, you should be able to defend yourself if necessary, but it shouldn't be necessary, and people, usually men, who get off on violent confrontation are a danger to themselves and the community as a whole.
 
I think women doing the mate selection is one way, providing, of course, that they actually select for more passive, less aggressive men. Some women wouldn't. I wouldn't, for one. I'm not saying I'd want Charles Bronson or "The Rock", but I wouldn't choose Alan Alda or Woody Allen, either.

Only in a peaceful, relatively prosperous era could I see that ever being possible.

As for how it happened in the past, could greater attrition among aggressive, violent, men have been a factor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRz8uERFQ2g
 
I saw that movie the other day, it was great. That's a good point. Over aggression is a lack of discipline. Humans actually became more proficient at violence through "self-domestication", because discipline and cooperation, led to armies.

I watched one interview on youtube with Scorcese, De Niro, and Pacino, and now my "recommended" videos are like a greatest hits of mob movies. I was reminded of "Goodfellas".

I know a lot of people who adore that movie, know whole scenes by heart. I watched it only once. The violence is too real in it. The Joe Pesci character was scary as hell, and a perfect example of the kind of berserker character who should be locked away from other people.

Yet, people are infinitely complicated, even people like that. Think of that scene in the middle of the night with his mother...a total sociopath/psychopath who loves his mother.

Who can really understand the human animal?
 
While this is getting off the point, I'm fascinated by the idealization of the mother in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. And this was a two-way street . . . Douglas MacArthur's mother took an apartment near West Point so she could look into her son's room at the Point throughout his time there.

I don't think any of this survives today. I suppose pretty much everyone loves their mother, but love their wife or husband more. Has anyone ever looked into this deification of mothers and what it meant?
 
While this is getting off the point, I'm fascinated by the idealization of the mother in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. And this was a two-way street . . . Douglas MacArthur's mother took an apartment near West Point so she could look into her son's room at the Point throughout his time there.

I don't think any of this survives today. I suppose pretty much everyone loves their mother, but love their wife or husband more. Has anyone ever looked into this deification of mothers and what it meant?


What reading on the topic I've done was usually in the context of literature, particularly Victorian literature, and more generally in terms of the "mother" figure in general through the works of people like Joseph Campbell and his exploration of myth in western consciousness, including the figure of "The Great Mother".

This is a pretty good treatment of what people in general call the "sentimentality" of not only the 19th but the 18th century Anglo world, a sentimentality which spread throughout Europe and the U.S. etc.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230595507_6

A reading of Joseph Campbell, if you're unfamiliar with him, is well worth your while.

I think, though, and thought when I originally studied the topic that these treatments, mainly earlier ones, in fact, much discussed in my university days, suffered from the fact that Anglo academics only look at phenomenon like this from the perspective of the Anglo World, which is very short sighted of them.

I could make an argument that the idealization of the "mother", which was born not out of an intellectual "idea", but from actual human experience, is as old as man, and was certainly part both of the "mother worship" of the ancient world, and of the importance assigned to Mary, the mother of God.

A course in European art devoted to Mary as the "Mother" is very informative. Now, such depictions, and the emotion attached to them, were present all over Europe, but during the Protestant reformation Northern Europe found it relatively easy to jettison them. That wasn't the case in Southern Europe, and most particularly not the case in Italy, where such depictions are way more common than in France and Spain, for example. (I'm not so sure about the Greek Orthodox sphere.)

When looking at a lot of these depictions, I get very little sense of the divine. What I see is a very earthly depiction of a very tactile, emotional attachment of a mother toward her infant.

Now, to this day, Latin men, and Greek men, and men in the Near East, and indeed in a lot of different parts of the world are known for their attachment to their mothers. Unfortunately, imo, that attachment is denigrated to some degree.

Certainly, a man has to, as scripture says, leave his family and cling onto his wife, but those bonds are difficult to break, and can cause problems in the marital relationship.

However, particularly in the modern era, I wonder how adaptive that actually is. How many times do people marry, or find their significant "other" and then are betrayed, split, heartbroken? The number of mothers who abandon their children is much smaller even in the Anglo countries or some other European countries, and is virtually unknown in others.

I can also tell you it's not just limited to men. When I married I told my husband in no uncertain terms that there was a limit to how far away I was willing to move from my mother. Also, in a funny take off on that, while playing one of those stupid games about who would you save first if all your family and friends were drowning, my husband shot out his hand and says, oh, I can answer that: I think he said that first I'd say the children, then my mother, then my father, then him. He was absolutely right.

I think he shocked some people. Now, some of that was because of the vulnerability of the children and my middle aged parents compared to him, but he had a finger on my inner "scale", much as I loved him.

My nonna once said to me: love your husband, honor him, take care of him, but remember than you can have one husband, or two, or three, but you only have one mother and father, and no one will ever care for you with such unconditional love as they do.

Or think of AIDS patients, when it was so deadly. Yes, some partners stepped up to the plate, but usually it was the parents, often the mother.


  • attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.” – George Washington
  • “The doctors told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.” – Wilma Rudolph
  • “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.” – Thomas Alva Edison
  • "When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options; nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her." -- Sheryl Sandberg
  • “All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.” – Abraham Lincoln
  • “A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.” – Washington Irving
  • "My family has very strong women. My other never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money, because Africa was the 'dark continent,' and because I was a girl." – Jane Goodall
  • "My mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier you'll be a general; if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."—Pablo Picasso
  • "My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors." – Maya Angelou
  • "It seems to me that my mother was the most splendid woman I ever knew... I have met a lot of people knocking around the world since, but I have never met a more thoroughly refined woman than my mother. If I have amounted to anything, it will be due to her."—Charles Chaplin
  • "My mother taught me about the power of inspiration and courage, and she did it with a strength and a passion that I wish could be bottled." – Carly Fiorina
  • "I think my mother...made it clear that you have to live life by your own terms and you have to not worry about what other people think and you have to have the courage to do the unexpected." – Caroline Kennedy
  • "Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love." – Stevie Wonder
 
An excellent book on the topic of this thread is "The Goodness Paradox" (2019) by Richard Wrangham. He makes a distinction between reactive aggression, which declined with self-domestication, and proactive aggression. He contends that the human capacity for coalitionary proactive aggression, such as organized warfare, increased with self-domestication.

Wrangham favours the execution of reactively violent males by their social group as the selective force behind human domestication. In my view he dismisses mate selection as a selective force too quickly, but I recommend his book. Wrangham is also quoted in the first link in this thread.
 
An excellent book on the topic of this thread is "The Goodness Paradox" (2019) by Richard Wrangham. He makes a distinction between reactive aggression, which declined with self-domestication, and proactive aggression. He contends that the human capacity for coalitionary proactive aggression, such as organized warfare, increased with self-domestication.

Wrangham favours the execution of reactively violent males by their social group as the selective force behind human domestication. In my view he dismisses mate selection as a selective force too quickly, but I recommend his book. Wrangham is also quoted in the first link in this thread.

Thank you, Tamakore. I'm going to take a look.
 

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