On Dogs
We Didn't Domesticate Them; They Domesticated Themselves
At certain points, President Donald Trump has seemed to have a favorite epithet, a term of contempt: “like a dog.”
Mitt Romney could have been president, but he “choked like a dog.” Broadcaster David Gregory was “fired like a dog.” In a presidential debate, Senator Marco Rubio started to “sweat like a dog.”
Brent Bozell of the National Review came “begging for money like a dog.” In their Senate testimony, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates started “to choke like dogs.”
Referring to his former assistant Omarosa Manigault Newman, President Trump wrote, “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”
What does it actually mean, to be “like a dog”?
I have a yellow Labrador Retriever named Snow. Her defining characteristic is attunement to individuals. When Snow first met my son, then eight years old, he was afraid of dogs. She was tender and quiet with him. By contrast, my daughter, then five years old, was exuberant, playful, and full of laughter. Snow romped and jumped and nearly laughed with her.
Where do dogs come from? What is their relationship to wolves? Where does Homo Sapiens come from? What is our relationship to Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, the Denisovans, and various other human species that went extinct?
Researchers are converging on the conclusion that, in all probability, the answers to all of these questions turn on the same phenomenon: domestication. But in important respects, this seemingly mundane word is misleading. It conceals plenty of mysteries, and, perhaps, a miracle or two.
With respect to dogs, it has long been thought that human beings had adopted wolf pups, perhaps the most adorable, and trained them, loved them, and gradually converted them into dogs. Two pioneers in modern thinking about the origins of dogs, Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, call this the “Pinocchio Theory,” after the tale of the woodcarver who turned a block of wood into a real boy. But in view of recent research, it is increasingly difficult to believe that people domesticated dogs. It is far more likely that dogs domesticated themselves. We did not choose them. They chose us.
Some of the defining work was spearheaded by Dmitri Belyaev, a visionary Soviet geneticist who had been a hero in World War II. A charismatic scholar who could easily command a massive lecture hall, Belyaev had the great misfortunate of beginning his career in the early 1950s under the reign of Joseph Stalin.
Among other things, this meant that his work was severely constrained by the influence of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, a scientific fraud who abhorred “Western genetics.” He had managed to obtain Stalin’s favor and so he ruled over Soviet science like a tyrant. But Belyaev, while still in his teens, had been inspired by the work of his brother Nikolai, a famous geneticist who was arrested and executed in 1937 for his interest in Western genetics. To some extent, Belyaev was protected from official reprisal by his status as a war hero. Still, he had to watch himself carefully.
