[Der Fuhrer]

Humans vs. Nature:

Humans and nature powerful - developmental logic
Humans powerful, nature vulnerable - compassionate logic
Humans vulnerable, nature powerful - tribal logic
Humans and nature vulnerable - hollothetic logic

A statement using hollothetic logic would make a claim that humans have, in some way, defiled the environment, and by doing so we are orchestrating our own demise. Hollothetic logic is synonymous with psychological dissonance.


Fun fact: 90% of all extinct species became extinct before humans existed.

However, if a species is to survive in a world with humans, it must prove to be worth money. Wild cows (Anguar) are not worth money, and therefore they are practically extinct.

The problem here, as I have stated before, is that people today, who are so far removed from nature view animals as either people or things. In fact, nature in general is perceived as either a thing or a sanctuary. For a logging company, a forest is a product, and the spotted owl is a manufacturing problem. For the Sierra Club, the forest is a sanctuary, defiled by man.

Laboratory animals, used in research, are either hapless victims, to be rescued in daring commando raids and bestowed names, or they are simply pieces of equipment to be ordered from a catalog along with Petri dishes. It is simply too hard to see them for what they are--animals that can suffer, but animals that are not people either.

It is a challenge for a society ever further removed from nature to retain a grasp on its place in nature. Yet the tendency of both those who would conquer nature and those who would save it is to draw a line and declare human society ever apart from nature.

If we come to see the domestication of animals not as a crime against nature, but as a product of nature, we will in the process confront something much more fundamental about man's part in nature. If life with man was a better evolutionary bargain for domesticated animals than was life in the wild, then it makes no sense to say that nature (really just another word for evolution) ends where man's presence begins. And it raises doubts about larger judgments based on the premise that whatever is wild is pristine, whatever is human is tarnished. Man is easily shocked by the horror stories of the laboratory and the barn in part because we are ignorant of the greater horrors of the wood and water, horror stories written by nature, the cruel bitch, herself.

The thing is that nature (or evolution) doesn't care about the individual plight of the cow being led to slaughter. All of nature's strategies for survival of a species, strategies that include domestication, include suffering and death of individual members of that species. Old moose fall to pursuing wolves so that the young might live; lambs die to an axfall behind the barn so that more don't die of starvation, hunger, disease, and predation.

Most of us are so accustomed to the notion that domestication was a human exploit that to suggest otherwise can make one sound more like a fool than a scientist. There are some fundamental scientific concepts, however, that underscore the argument for domestication as the evolutionary product of a mutual strategy for survival.

First, the ancestor's of today's domesticated plants and animals were, like the mice invading our homes, opportunists, not conservatives. They were species adapted by their evolutionary past to exploiting new terrain on the forest's edge, rather than specializing in niches in the forest center. The first domesticated animals--dogs, sheep and cattle--were social species that readily scavenged new food sources. The first plants domesticated were weeds, in effect--sunflowers and gourds that would invade any disturbed soil.

The story told time and time again in the archaeological record is one of long, loose associations between the free-living partners before full-fledged domesticated relationships appear. The rise of agriculture, long viewed as a revolution, was really a long evolution. Man, animals, and plants engaged in thousands of years of close association before domestication blossomed.

At Tepe Ali Kosh, an early food processing site in what is today southwestern Iran that has yielded some of the best archaeological data, domestic plant species account for around 5% of of the seeds from 9,000 years ago, 1,000 years later they account for only 40%. At Tel Abu Hureyra, one of the first permanent settlements in the world, located on the banks of the Euphrates River in northern Syria, bones of domesticated sheep and goats appear 9,500 years ago. They account for 10% of the bones found at the site (the rest are entirely wild gazelles) until finally growing to 60% around 8,500 years ago.

Wild cats, which probably invaded the granaries of the first agricultural settlements of the Near East some 9,000 years ago in pursuit of rodents, lived in free-association with humans for thousands of years before the Egyptians, who associated the male cat with the sun god Ra and the female cat with the goddess of fertility Bast, began confining them to the temples and deliberately breeding them, around 4,000 years ago. Over the next several thousand years they began spreading throughout the Near East and into Europe.

Man is far from the only species to practice domestication. Cooperative associations between some unlikely pairs appear throughout nature. In almost all there is one reoccurring pattern: the defense mechanisms that allow a species to survive on its own, but likewise make it fearful of associating with others, are dropped; in return, tangible benefits in the form of protection or food are gained. The state of dependency of one species upon another is not degeneracy, it is a finely tuned evolutionary strategy for survival. Nature has with surprising frequency, in a world so competitive, cast upon the solution of cooperation.

Finally, all domestic animals, in both behavior and appearance, retain juvenile traits in adulthood. One of the very first hints in the archaeological record of an animal's domestication is the jawbone of a wolf from southwest Asia, dated 12,000 years ago, in which the face and muzzle have begun to shorten. In other words, an adult with the face of a puppy. It is a process that has been repeated in every domestic animal. And that one fact of their evolution speaks volumes about what they are and how they came to be. Domestic animals are dependent, permanently juvenile, by nature, not just by circumstance or training. And, according to fossil evidence that long predates the age of domestication, they are completing a process of genetic evolution that was initiated not by man's captive breeding, but by the need to adapt to an environment racked by giant glaciers in the Ice Age that lasted a million years and ended only 10,000 years ago.