The First to Fall

Tag: psychology

  • What IS domestication?

    At its core, domestication is a selection process shaped by control objectives. I want a cow that is easiest to extract milk and meat from. I want a chicken for the easiest scrambled eggs and sweet and sour wings possible. I want a dog for the best companionship or easiest hunting experience possible. When we domesticate a plant, animal, or person, we have an objective. We’re trying to extract something and we want that extraction to be as quick and easy as possible. So what gets favored or suppressed in a breeding program or a training regimen depends on what makes the organism more compatible with our human-defined system of control. And across species (including humans), here’s what that looks like…

    We select for individuals that are calmer, more tolerant of handling, and more willing to defer to authority or hierarchy. We want reduced variability in responses to stimuli (think “calm” dog vs “reactive” dog)…steady, less surprising behavior is easier to manage. We consistently reward (or at least end up with) juvenile traits (neoteny) like playfulness, submissiveness, and prolonged dependency. These make the domesticate easier to mold and keep in a controlled state. Traits that allow reproduction on human terms are also heavily favored…earlier sexual maturity, more frequent cycles, larger litter sizes (or in humans, lineages that adapt to arranged marriages, “concubinage,” follow religious edicts to “go forth and multiply,” etc.). Finally, the ability to navigate symbolic or artificial rules is prized…dogs attuning to human gestures, and humans adapting to bureaucracies or religions.

    There are are a few qualities fundamentally opposed to control. These are the traits that selected against in a domestication process. Reactive aggression and impulsivity clearly disrupts group or handler control. High sensory reactivity and vigilance are problems, as well. Skittishness, flight responses, or overreaction to confinement make animals (and people) harder to control. Next, any overt sign of autonomy / resistance to control is obviously and inherently something that needs deletion. Whether that’s a dog that won’t stay in the yard, sheep that have a habit of jumping fences, or a human who won’t accept various forms of subjugation…it simply can’t be tolerated. Broadly speaking, unpredictability needs to trained / bred out. Any trait that makes outcomes less stable…irregular reproduction, volatile behavior, refusal to follow routine. Excessive independence has no home here. Animals that refuse to bond with humans and humans that refuse to bond with institutions are destined for the slaughterhouse, prison, shelter, behavioral therapy, the streets, the margins.

    Taken together, this suite of traits produces the domestication syndrome. Smaller brains, reduced sexual dimorphism, more juvenile features, dampened stress responses, and greater and greater compliance. It’s clearly a stunting process…but one that optimizes survival inside artificial systems of control.

    So, what is domestication?

    You could say it’s the selection against an animal’s drive to act independently of a system of control.

  • Domestications V1.0 / V2.0 (hunter-gatherers / suburbanites)

    If the egalitarian hunter-gatherers I talk about so much are the “stall point” in the runaway process of domestication, then why do they carry the same suite of domestication traits seen in your average 2025 city-dweller? The same smaller brains (~10-15%) compared to archaic Homo. The same reduced sexual dimorphism (males and females less divergent in body size and head features). The same gracile skeletons, shorter faces, and smaller teeth. The same prolonged juvenile traits.

    Physiologically, they’re as domesticated as farmers, CEOs, and everyone else alive. The domestication syndrome is species-wide, and at first glance that seems to be a hole in my hypothesis.

    I’d argue that where HGs differ isn’t in the physiological baseline, but in the social use of those traits. They maintain egalitarian checks (mocking, ostracism, flexible band membership) that prevent runaway hierarchy. They don’t fully overweight social priors at the expense of sensory/environmental feedback. And their “flattening” is limited…diverse behavior is tolerated, as long as no one seizes too much control. I see them as domesticated bodies living in relatively non-domesticating systems.

    This is how I see it: a certain suite of traits emerges once as part of Homo sapiens’ domestication arc. Different systems (e.g. HG bands vs. states) then determine how that suite is expressed/reinforced/suppressed. Think of it as baseline domestication (the whole physiological package…universal by ~30,000 years ago) and runaway domestication (social systems amplifying the control side and pushing traits further…heavier attenuation and greater conformity).

    Runaway domestication is where some extra behavioral flattening happens. The very strong selection against independence within control systems. Hunter-gatherers do exert control, but on a much smaller scale. You could say their control systems, while not allowing runaway hierarchy (kings and presidents), still weeded out the most disruptive unpredictability…people who can’t cooperate at all, or who are violently antisocial. But under agriculture and states (post Younger Dryas), that weeding out is magnified into systems of slavery, bureaucracy, and mass coercion. The driver is the same (selection against independence)…it’s the degree that’s different.

    We’re talking about a 2-stage process, then. The species-wide baseline (enough selection against reactivity/autonomy to stabilize a group) and a civilizational runaway (the selection against independence becomes way more aggressive).

    If that sounds like bullshit to you, consider the Australia case.

    Anatomically modern humans reached Australia around 65,000 years ago. That’s before the sharpest phase of human brain-size shrinkage ~30,000-10,000 years ago (a known marker of domestication in animals and humans). The original Australian populations diverged early and developed in almost complete isolation from later Eurasian agricultural/civilizational pressures. They remained foragers until very recently (colonial contact), and while they engaged in complex land management systems (fire-stick farming and aquaculture), there was no large-scale ag, urbanism, or state hierarchy. In other words, they had far less exposure to the kinds of control systems that I accuse of driving runaway domestication.

    And what do we see?

    Sure enough, fossil and skeletal data from Australia populations don’t show anywhere near the same degree of gracilization that appears in Holocene Eurasia. They have robust cranial and skeletal features compared to Europeans of the same era. That suggests to me that the full domestication suite probably didn’t occur in the same way there. You could say they carry the “baseline” domestication package, but not the civilizational package.

    If full domestication is selection against unpredictability in control systems, then societies without large-scale control systems (like foragers in Australia) should show less of what I’m calling runaway domestication. And that’s exactly what we see.

  • Human Self-Domestication…selection against autonomy, not hot heads.

    Richard Wrangham frames selection against reactive aggression (he uses the term “hot heads”) as the driver of human self-domestication and argues that our level of proactive aggression largely remained the same. He describes these as distinct evolutionary strategies, each with different adaptive costs and benefits.

    To be clear, reactive aggression is impulsive, emotionally-driven violence in response to provocation or frustration (e.g. bar fights, chimpanzee dominance squabbles, etc.). Proactive aggression is calculated, planned violence deployed strategically for advantage (e.g. ambushes, executions, coordinated raids).

    Wrangham’s central point is that self-domestication arises when reactive aggression is consistently punished (and culled), while proactive aggression not only persists but is sometimes institutionalized (authorities get a monopoly on violence).

    His reasoning is as follows.

    In small-scale societies, reactive aggressors were costly to group stability. They disrupted cooperation, created unpredictability, and risked alienating allies. With language and coalitionary power, groups gained the ability to collectively punish or kill these “hot heads.” Over many generations, this reduced the frequency of impulsively aggressive temperaments in the gene pool. The result is a calmer, more tolerant baseline disposition in humans compared to chimpanzees…one of the classic “domestication syndrome” traits.

    What rubs me the wrong way is how quickly Wrangham assumes, out of all the traits that make up domestication syndrome, that reactive aggression is what was being selected for. Why wouldn’t the selection pressure be for proactive aggression, for example? Wrangham admits that proactive aggression was reinforced in human evolution. We became better at planned violence (executions, warfare, conquest) than any other primate. Crucially, proactive aggression is socially sanctioned…it’s framed as justice, punishment, or defense of the group. That makes it evolutionarily advantageous, not disadvantageous. In Wrangham’s model, the ability to conspire and kill reactively aggressive individuals is itself an expression of proactive aggression, and therefore part of what made us more cooperative at scale.

    This hypothesis feels reductive to me. Domestication in other species involves selection for predictability, docility, and compliance, not just low reactivity. By centering only on reactive aggression, Wrangham treats self-domestication as a paradoxical success story…calmer humans enabled cooperation, and cooperation enabled civilization. It leaves out what civilization actually does…the flattening of error landscapes, where any form of reactivity (not just aggression) becomes maladaptive in large, controlled groups.

    I’ve been thinking seriously about whether an argument could be made, just as strong or stronger than Wrangham’s, that selection for proactive aggression was the real driver in the human domestication story.

    Large-scale violence is a consistent theme in the emergence of complex societies…from the mass graves of the Neolithic to the conquest states of Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and beyond. Warfare, conquest, and raiding were not incidental to civilization. They were the engines of state formation, with proactive aggression (planned and coordinated violence) clearly rewarded at both the genetic and cultural level.

    Take the Y-chromosome bottleneck (5,000-7,000 years ago). It shows that ~90-95% of male lineages were extinguished, leaving only a few dominant bloodlines. This is genetic evidence of the real pattern of civilizational “coordination”: violent conquest and reproductive monopoly by elite men. Where in civilization’s history is Wrangham’s “peaceful coalitionary suppression of “bad apples”?” I just don’t see it. “Super-ancestor” events (e.g. Genghis Khan’s lineage) show the same thing in miniature. Proactive, organized aggression yields massive reproductive skew.

    In fact, let’s turn to reproductive skew and polygyny. Even convention historical narratives tell a story of high-status males (kings, chiefs, emperors, warlords) with harems, concubines, and multiple wives. these are outcomes made possible by proactive aggression…conquest, enslavement, and the monopolization of resources. Lower-status men were excluded from reproduction, not because they were “too reactive” (though those certainly would have been excluded as well), but because they lost wars, were enslaved, or killed.

    Proactive aggression isn’t just violence. It’s long-term planning, coalition-building, deception, and symbolic justification (myths, laws, and religions sanctifying violence makes up most of the human history book). These are precisely the traits that expand during the civilizing process…organizational capacity, abstract rule-following, and symbolic reasoning, all in service of controlling large groups.

    I have a few thoughts on why Wrangham favors the other story (selection against reactive aggression). It links directly to his bonobo analogy (their lower reactivity compared to chimps). And it fits with domestication syndrome traits (softer faces and reduced baseline violence), of course. But these seem weak to me. What it comes down to, I believe, is Wrangham gravitating toward an age-old optimistic narrative…humans becoming more cooperative (from the “less hot-headed” angle), writing poems, and painting the Sistine Chapel. To me this is yet another just-so story tilted toward optimism. Real, documented human history (and the present, to a large extent) reads like selection for manipulative, proactive violence. Those who excel at strategic violence and symbolic control reproduce disproportionately. Full stop. This fits much better with what we see in the pages of history…runaway systems of control, hierarchies, and narrative manipulations that still structure our domesticated condition. These are better explained as the costs of selecting for proactive aggression than as some sort of “goodness paradox”.

    In fact, it might be a silly thought experiment, but who’s to say that if were possible to actively select for proactive aggression in other species, that domestication traits wouldn’t appear?

    To me, domestication syndrome (floppy ears, smaller brains, prolonged neoteny, pigmentation changes, altered reproductive cycles) arises because selection pressure narrows the error landscape of a species. The mechanism most often discussed is neural crest cell changes…but the reason for those changes could be any number of selection pressures. In foxes, it was tameness toward humans. In humans (Wrangham), he says it was lower reactive aggression. But it could also plausibly be selection for predictability, planning, and controlled aggression if that’s what the system demanded (and did, and does!).

    The core idea is if you reduce the payoff for being “unpredictably reactive” and increase the payoff for being “strategically compliant,” the biology shifts. The neural, hormonal, and developmental systems adapt to reward that niche. The syndrome may look similar (the smaller brains, juvenilization, etc.) because what’s really being selected for is attenuation of wild-type reactivity in general.

    Let’s move away from what I see as Wrangham’s too-narrow focus and broaden this narrative a bit.

    Let’s look at the human story from a predictive coding lens, and consider scarcity as a selector. In times of ecological stress, groups face more prediction errors (crops fail, animals migrate, rivers dry up). Some individuals resolve error by updating their model (adjusting expectations, moving). Others resolve error by updating the world…forcing it into alignment with their model. The latter is the logic of domestication…bend plants, animals, landscapes, and people into predictability.

    From here, we can see proactive aggression as control in action. On the ground, this isn’t abstract. Pull up wild plants and keep only the docile grains. Cull the fence-jumping sheep and reactive roosters…breed the calm ones. Raid nearby villages, enslave, execute dissenters, and reward compliance. This is proactive aggression. Planned, systemic, future-oriented control. It’s violence as policy.

    This makes me think of how Robert Kelly frames humanity’s cultural revolution. He proposes that symbolic thought makes it possible to imagine not just “what is,” but “what should be.” And “what should be” becomes a shared prior (model of the world) that groups can coordinate around…even if it doesn’t match reality. Once you can coordinate around a model, you can impose it, and enforce conformity within the group. To me, that’s proactive aggression (if we’re still calling it that) elevated…control not only of bodies now, but of perception and imagination.

    What disappears under a system like that? Well, for one, reactive aggression clearly becomes intolerable. It represents autonomous feedback (an individual saying “no” in the moment). In control systems, that kind of unpredictable resistance is punished most severely. You know that. Slaves who rebel are killed. Chickens that cause problems are culled. Men who resist capture are killed first. The system slowly culls “reactors” and favors the predictable (those who update their selves rather than the system).

    This is what I see as the flattening of the civilizing process…the rock tumbler effect. Proactive aggression is the abrasive force that flattens everything…landscapes, genetic diversity, behavioral variation, etc., etc. Reactive aggression is just one of the first “edges” to be ground away. A byproduct of selecting for proactive control. A footprint of the real selection pressure. And what remains is a domesticated phenotype…more compliant, less volatile, more predictable.

    Not convinced? Try this experiment.

    Write these two hypotheses out on a sheet of paper:

    1. “Coalitions punish hot-heads -> reactive aggression selected against -> cooperative, domesticated humans emerge.”
    2. “Coalitions punish (in- and out-group) resistors to group control -> resistance (often expressed as reactive aggression…rebellion, resistance to domination) -> compliant, predictable humans emerge.

    Now read as many history books as you can, testing these as you go. Take notes.

    Only one of these hypotheses explains why proactive aggression thrives where reactive aggression doesn’t. There is no paradox. Proactive aggression isn’t punished because it aligns with group objectives, and what disappears isn’t “bad tempers” but unmanaged defiance. Resistors are killed. Compliant captives are taken. Rebels are executed. Compliant laborers survive.

    This is selection against the unpredictable expression of autonomy that disrupts control.

  • Tribalism, Consensus Reality, and Domestication

    I think it’s safe to say that feedback-sensitive (neurodivergent) people are less susceptible to tribalism. Under most circumstances (I’ll get to the exceptions), we’re less likely to be a conservative, a democrat, a fundamentalist, etc.

    Tribalism (the tendency to take your group’s beliefs as your own and enter into conflict with other groups) depends on high-precision social priors…shared norms, loyalty cues, in-group/out-group boundaries. But we rely more on direct sensory evidence or logical consistency than on these socially constructed signals. The pull of group identity isn’t as strong for us.

    I don’t experience the same automatic emotional reward for aligning with group opinion. I don’t get that warm and fuzzy feeling called “patriotism,” for example. I’ve never understood it. If an in-group belief contradicts observed reality, I can’t help but question it…even if it costs social standing. And tribal systems clearly punish that.

    Tribalism thrives on broad, simplified narratives (“they’re all like that”), which smooth over (or blind people to) exceptions. But exceptions are what catch my attention the most. Outliers that break the spell of group generalizations stand out to me, and I’m constantly stupefied that this isn’t the case for most people.

    Neurodivergents aren’t always resistant to tribalism, of course. In environments where belonging feels existentially necessary (which is just about every fucking environment in 2025), we can certainly conform strongly…overcompensate even.

    But I’d argue that for most of human history, where the “opt-out” option was real, if the group became oppressive, coercive, or incompatible with our temperament, we simply….left. And that escape valve probably served as a check on group conformity and control.

    We’d leave for a number of reasons. If group norms are arbitrary or contradictory, sticking around creates constant prediction error. As hard as it is, departure is often the path of least resistance for someone like me, and probably would have been for people like me in the past. We were also probably self-reliant in certain domains. Many autistic skill sets (deep knowledge in specific areas, tracking environmental patterns) would translate to survivability outside rigid social structures. And a drive for integrity over belonging means that physical separation would have been (and still is) preferable to constant self-betrayal.

    Wherever civilization spreads, the option to leave disappears. Agricultural and industrial societies lock people into fixed territories, usually controlled by central authorities. Survival becomes tied to participating in a single dominant system (currency, markets, legal structures), removing just about every parallel option. And instead of many small groups to choose from, there’s effectively one “tribe” (the society and its cultural apparatus). The option to “simply leave” is gone now, I’d say.

    Without the option to leave, those of us who would naturally walk away face a stark choice…either overcompensate (learn to mimic, mask, and fit despite the cost) or withstand isolation (remain noncompliant and absorb the social/economic consequences). I think this goes a long way in explaining why in the modern era autistic burnout and mental health crises are more visible (Breaking News: Autism Epidemic!!). The evolutionary safety valve is….gone.

    I’m not wired for tribalism. It looks ridiculous to me. I hate that people have this sort of neediness for it. Especially when, in 2025, we recognize it as the greatest barrier to humanity effectively addressing global crises…from planet destruction to systematic inequality and democratic collapse. It creates moral elasticity, where harm is justified by group loyalty. It creates rivalries purely for identity’s sake (beating the shit out of each other over a fucking soccer match). It makes coordinated responses impossible. It’s fucking dumb.

    This is all deeply bound up with what I call consensus reality (the shared social priors/expectations that a group holds about “what is real,” how the world works,” and “what matters”). In that context, I see tribalism as the emotional and identity-binding mechanism that keeps people committed to those social expectations, defends them from contradiction, and rejects competing models from out-groups. Consensus reality (what people call “the real world”) gives tribalism content…stories, values, and assumptions the group agrees on. And tribalism, in turn, gives consensus reality teeth…social rewards for conformity and penalties for deviation. You could see it it as the social immune system that suppresses any error signal that might disrupt the shared model people consider “reality.”

    Which brings me back to a core idea of my book: every degree of separation from reality (unmediated feedback) creates space in which lies and manipulation can be used to control human behavior. Symbolic representation, bureaucracy, technology, propaganda…all stand between an action and its consequence. From a predictive processing perspective, these separations replace sensory precision with social priors. Once your perception of consequence is dominated by priors handed to you by others, your model of reality can be steered by whoever’s controlling the narrative (regardless of what’s actually happening right outside your window).

    In the human domestication frame I’m building, this explains how a control system matures. Reduce a person’s direct contact with feedback, fill the gap with consensus reality (shared fictions), and use tribalism to keep the consensus coherent and defended.

    It also explains why nothing changes. Everyone’s wondering why humanity can’t seem to course-correct, but this isn’t rocket science. Mainstream “solutions” operate entirely inside mediated spaces, accepting layers of separation from reality as normal or inevitable. They try to optimize those spaces…fact-checking information, creating better messaging, nudging behavior with persuasive campaigns. They ignore the gap itself. The underlying problem (that people’s models of reality are no longer tethered to direct, embodied, ecological feedback) is left untouched.

    In other words, people just swap one set of social priors for another, without increasing the precision of sensory input from the real world. Their brains are still mostly being updated by other people’s models instead of reality itself. That’s like improving the entertainment or fairness of the feedlot without questioning why the fuck the animals can’t simply graze in the field anymore. The control system remains intact (strengthened, maybe) because the medium of control (the gap) is preserved.

    This is why giving people access to more information isn’t solving anything. We may have created gaps between action and consequence, but evolution hasn’t removed the cognitive biases and drives that were calibrated for direct feedback. Those drives still operate, but now they need something to work on in the absence of reality’s immediacy…and that “something” becomes bullshit. Shared fictions.

    Why? Why do people need so much bullshit?

    For one, I think hard-wired biases still expect input. Traits like negativity bias, advantage-seeking, and status monitoring evolved to process real-time environmental cues. Without direct cues, they grab onto representations (bullshit) because the brain just can’t seem to tolerate informational vacuum.

    Bullshit comes in to fill prediction gaps. Without high-precision sensory input, shared social fictions are used to predict outcomes. Those fictions become the scaffolding (myths, ideologies, propaganda) that keep the model “stable” even if it drifts from reality (like when it starts baking the planet).

    Next thing you know, manipulation rides in on necessity. Because social fictions are now the only widely shared basis for action, whoever controls them effectively controls the behavior of the group. Domestication leverages this (the feed is always narrative feed…never the real field).

    The further the separation from unmediated feedback, the more elaborate the fiction has to be to sustain group coordination and suppress error signals. Fast forward to 2025, and people are acting entirely on their group’s fictions…with reality surfacing only in the form of the most immediate and extreme crises (which then get reabsorbed into new narrative).

    Where are feedback-sensitive people in this story? Where’s that autistic guy?

    Well, if your brain assigns low precision to social priors, then the fictions that fill feedback gaps for most people feel…jarring, flimsy, or outright hostile. My brain gives more weight to sensory or logical evidence, and that means constant prediction error when I interact with a model that’s running entirely on narrative rather than reality.

    In domestication terms, that makes me an outlier in a control system that depends on narrative compliance. For the “typical” person, the fiction is not only tolerable but necessary for coordination. For me, it’s a constant source of friction (because the group’s stabilizing story is exactly where I detect the misalignment most vividly).

    I’m heavy into predictive coding literature (Friston, Clark, etc.) right now, so I’ll try to frame some of my main arguments in those terms. (I’ll probably get it wrong)

    Consensus reality is….encultured hyperpriors. Culture installs hyperpriors (very high-level expectations about “how things are”). They’re learned and built up by language and institutions, and they set the precision economy (which signals get trusted).

    Human domestication is a sort of niche construction. One that rewards minds able to thrive in symbol-dense, delayed-feedback environments. The effect is a recalibration of precision…social model-based predictions gain weight and raw sensory error loses weight. This is the flattening of the error landscape, so to speak.

    Social priors are what let us coordinate at scale (which is rarely necessary…unless you’ve fucked up at scale), but trouble starts when precision sticks to bad priors in rapidly shifting or bullshit-heavy niches (media, bureaucracy), drowning out any errors that might have resulted in correction.

    An autistic person’s low tolerance for fictions is a different precision setting. It continually surfaces mismatches others smooth over. Which largely feels like shit (derealization, friction) for the autistic person, but is epistemically valuable (less “consensus-blindness,” wink wink, Peter Vermeulen).

    I’ve been talking about human domestication as selection against reactivity, but I know I have to be careful with single-trait stories like that. Maybe what’s selected are policies that minimize expected free energy in a given niche. In dense, rule-ridden societies, that means predictability-friendly (?) minds. Compliance. Delayed reward. Role fluency. Some kind of energy-efficient inference under control niches.

    This is where I’d be on my own, I think. This is the final “gap” where most of the highest-level thinkers are sort of playing…the control niche as a given. Someone like Andy Clarke (were he to agree with my line of reasoning so far), might say the solution is about tuning the system to balance priors and sensory input more adaptively. But in a domesticated, control-oriented society, “tuning” quickly becomes prescription…setting parameters so people remain useful to the system, not so they reconnect with (unmediated) reality).

    The more fundamental problem is that any centrally managed adjustment to perception keeps people inside a mediated model. It doesn’t restore autonomy…it optimizes compliance. And the last thing I want is to compliant in a system that is clearly out of touch with reality.

  • What Wrangham Gets Wrong About Human Domestication

    (Hint: 900,000 cows are slaughtered daily. They shit where they eat and wouldn’t have a hope in hell at surviving without human care. But they’re nice.)

    In The Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham argues that the main selection pressure in human (self-)domestication was the weeding out of reactive aggression. It’s a nice story that makes the net gain of human domestication harder to argue against. But, to me, it’s clear that selection against reactivity in general (or unpredictability) is the bigger, truer story, of which the reduction of “reactive aggression” is simply the most visible (and PR-friendly) chapter. Taken as a whole, and across species, the domestication package is clearly a general downshift in arousal/reactivity with a re-tuning of social expectations…not just the loss of hair-trigger violence.

    Let’s look at domestication again while entertaining this broader (and inconveniently less moralistic (duller, rather than nicer humans) selection pressure.

    For one thing, physiology moves first…and it’s general. In classic domestication lines (e.g. Belyaev’s foxes), selection for tameness blunts the HPA axis and stress hormones overall…fewer and fewer cortisol spikes, calmer baselines. That’s not “anti-aggression” specifically; it’s lower stress reactivity across contexts. Brain monoamines shift too (e.g. higher serotonin). That’s a whole-system calm that would make any behavior less jumpy (including but not limited to aggression).

    Developmental mechanism also points to a broader retune. The “domestication syndrome” is plausibly tied to mild neural-crest hypofunction, a developmental lever that touches pigmentation, craniofacial shape, adrenal medulla, and stress circuitry. In humans, BAZ1B (a neural-crest regulator) is linked to the “modern” face and is part of the self-domestication story. None of that is news…but if you tweak this lever, you clearly soften the whole reactivity profile…not just aggression. And my guess is that whoever’s fucking with the lever has his eye on the “compliance” dial more than any other.

    Comparative signals align, too. Genomic work finds overlaps between human selective sweeps and domestication-candidate genes across species…showing a syndrome-level process rather than some sort of single behavioral knob. Craniofacial “feminization” over time in H. Sapiens fits reduced androgenic/reactive profiles, too.

    Domesticated behavior tracks a “global calm.” Domesticated animals are less fearful, less erratic, and more socially tolerant than their wild counterparts. Your dog’s tendency to “look back” to you in unsolvable tasks is a manifestation of that…when arousal is lower and social cues are trusted, help-seeking beats reactive persistence. That’s a broad predictability play (that has nothing to do with aggression).

    Obviously, Wrangham’s focus still matters. His key point, the decoupling of reactive vs proactive aggression in humans (we got tamer in the heat-of-the-moment sense, but remained capable of planned, coalitionary violence), is real and important to explain. It’s part of the story, but not the whole story. As general reactivity is reduced, strategic (planned) aggression is preserved…because strategic aggression isn’t a startle reflex; it rides on executive control and group coordination. But selection against reactive aggression isn’t the driver in this story. It’s just one behavioral readout of a deeper arousal/volatility downshift. A nice part (maybe) of an otherwise quite shitty story (from life’s vantage point). The beef industry might point out how nice the cows are, but I don’t think even they would try to argue that “nice” is what it’s aiming for. Dull. Compliant. And so it goes with all domestication. There is an objective in the domestication process, and any and all traits that impede progress toward that objective are pruned. (adding “self-” to domestication when it comes to humans, while accurate in the sense that the domesticating agent was of the same species, gives it a voluntary flavor that has no evidence in history…the domestication of humans was driven by systemic enslavement and reproductive control just as it was for all domesticates)

    Why is it so important to me to find the driver of human domestication at all? Why not just start from the broadly-accepted premise that we are a domesticated species and go from there? Because I need to know what’s truly going on in the brain during this domestication process. How do we get to the brain we call “typical” now? What was it selected for? Was it selected for something broadly adaptive? Or is it more like runaway selection? An overfitting?

    To me, cognitively, domestication looks like a down-weighting of volatility and a reallocation of precision (in predictive-coding terms). Brains with lower expected volatility (that have “the world is less jumpy” as a hyperprior…fewer LC-NE-style alarm bursts…a calmer autonomic tone), higher precision on social priors (human signals are treated as the most trustworthy ones…ecological “noise” gets less weight), and policy canalization (high confidence in proximity/compliance/help-seeking policies).

    I think that human self-domestication primarily targeted behavioral and physiological volatility (a population-level reduction in phasic arousal and unpredictability) of which lower reactive aggression is a salient subset. And that the result is down-tuned HPA/LC reactivity, strengthened social priors, and canalized, low-variance action policies. Think of what happened as some sort of reactivity pruning (where reactive aggression was one prominent branch that got lopped off).

    What is the domesticated brain? Zoomed out, it’s clearly an instrument that’s been made dull. One that exhibits blunted responses to non-social unpredictability (startle, sensory oddballs, metabolic stressors), not just to dominance threats. And anti-aggression alone doesn’t suppress those.

    If I’m reading the studies properly, there are signatures of what I’m talking about in stress-regulatory and neuromodulatory pathways (HPA, serotonin, vasopressin) and neural-crest development…not just androgenic or specifically aggression-linked loci. Recent multispecies work pointing at vasopressin receptors and neural-crest regulators certainly seems consistent with this.

    Wrangham’s story doesn’t account for lower intra-individual variance in exploratory/avoidant switches and faster convergence on socially scaffolded policies (like help-seeking) across types of tasks (anti-aggression predicts biggest effects only in conflict contexts). It doesn’t explain the psychotic consensus reality holding everyone in, as it rolls off a cliff.

    (In fact, I question how much of the reactive aggression branch got lopped off…surely, not nearly as much as we think. What self-domestication mostly did was gate when, where, and how the majority of people show reactivity. When accountability and real-world consequences are high, most people keep a lid on it. When consequences drop (anonymity, distance, no eye contact, no immediate cost), the lid starts to rattle…online, in cars, in fan mobs, in comment sections. I don’t think reactive aggression was bred out so much as trained into context…and how well you do in that context will largely determine the story you tell. Harvard professors are clearly doing quite well in the civilizational context and consequently have pretty stories to tell.)

  • Human self-domestication, Pathological Demand Avoidance, and “self-control” walk into a bar…

    I’ve been circling something for a while now…trying to find the thread that runs through human self-domestication, self-control, and this term people throw around, PDA.

    I think it comes down to:

    Who (or what) is in control? and
    How do we decide what counts as a legitimate signal?

    Self-Domestication

    Over thousands of years, humans slowly became tamed. Depending on who you ask, they either tamed themselves (social pressure and mating preferences) or they tamed each other (slavery and control of reproduction). I’m of the latter opinion, but the point here isn’t the process, but its consequences…like less reactive aggression, more social tolerance, tighter symbolic governance, and the gradual internalization of rules. We stopped punching each other and starting performing for each other.

    Domestication was physical (smaller faces, softer jaws, reduced sexual dimorphism), but the the real shift was behavioral. We began outsourcing our regulation…from our gut/instinct to law and role. We made and obeyed rules…and over time became people who needed rules. You might say control became internalized (caged from the inside?).

    And I think this is where something like “self-control” shows up (and wearing a halo, no less).

    “Self-control.” Anyone with a brain should find that term suspicious. It splits the self in two: some sort of wild part that has to be restrained, and a righteous part that does the restraining? (what weird fucking animals we are) Honestly, I think it’s just a theological concept dressed up as psychology. And like most civilized “virtues,” it smells like bullshit once you sniff past the incense.

    Here’s what I think “self-control” really is: the cognitive costume of domestication.

    Think about it. It’s what supposedly lets us suppress emotion, delay gratification, comply with symbolic norms, and function in environments totally divorced from our biology…schools, offices, courtrooms, churches. Self-control sure as hell doesn’t mean living wisely…it’s about sitting still when your body says move, smiling when your nervous system screams no, and nodding along when everything inside says get the fuck out.

    In a natural system, “regulation” evolved to keep us alive (avoid cliffs, dodge snakes, read the tribe’s mood, etc.). But what is regulation in civilized systems? In modern society? It’s self-suppression in the name of some symbolic performance.

    Now enter “PDA” (Pathological Demand Avoidance). Or as I prefer to think of it…one of many glitches in the domestication software.

    Here’s the narrative: PDA is often seen in autistic and ADHD individuals. It’s marked by an intense resistance to demands (even “reasonable” ones) along with panic, shutdown, or rage. Notice the language: it’s “pathological” and it’s “avoidance.” Some smart people have suggested we change the P to “persistent,” and I think that’s a good start. But what about avoidance? Is resistance to control really “avoidance?” Defiance? Oppositional? I don’t think so. I think it’s a nervous system that reacts to control like poison…civilization-induced anaphylaxis.

    What if PDA is part of a broader biological resistance to domestication that still rattles the bars?

    Let’s go back to human self-domestication (which I’d argue is synonymous with the process we call “civilization).

    Civilization built a) systems and b) people who fit them. It selected for internal submission…people who could smile through exploitation, obey without understanding, perform without protest. And over time, the organism (us) adapted to control (because it survived).

    Great…it’s adaptive then….what’s the problem?

    The problem is that not all control is created equal.

    In living systems, control is ecological. Emergent. Immediate. You overhunt, food disappears. You act like a jerk, the group boots you. You walk through stinging nettles to take a pee…you learn. The feedback is timely, proportionate, local, and meaningful. And it regulates your behavior in ways that support life.

    Compare that to the feedback in our civilized systems.

    You break a dress code and lose your job.
    You poison a river and get a bonus.
    You speak truth and get punished.
    You conform and get promoted.

    This isn’t feedback…it’s symbolic distortion (bullshit mostly). Consequences are delayed, inverted, or entirely fake. We no longer act based on what is…we act based on what signals approval.

    What are you up to today? Are you going to school to pass tests that mean fuck all? Filing a report that no one will read? Obeying rules that no one really understands? Working a job that’s killing you…because your health insurance depends on it?

    It’s control as abstraction / simulation and it severs feedback from function. And when a system loses real feedback, it can’t adapt anymore. It can’t course-correct. I can only punish, delay, distract. (This is how collapse happens.)

    I’m rambly and angry today…

    PDA isn’t rebellion for its own sake. It isn’t resistance to structure. It’s resistance to unlinked structure…to rules with no grounding, demands with no meaning, performances with no reality beneath them. To papers with numbers on them. To digital clocks and alarms and metrics and schedules….

    It’s an involuntary response to any sort of control that bypasses sense and body and consequence.

    And yeah, I get it…some people will say I’m romanticizing resistance or prehistory…that “nature controls too,” and I’m just pissed off at society.

    Maybe. But have you ever asked yourself what the purpose of the control is? Or what the quality of it is?

    Does it really keep you alive…or does it keep you in line? I’d say ecological feedback is the only feedback that teaches you anything real.

    When we resist a meaningless demand, we’re not being defiant…we’re being awake (even if we don’t know it). We feel some distortion and some lie behind the request. We’re not okay performing a role that destroys something real. To me, that’s a sign that some part of the original organism (human) still exists and resists and still rings the alarm when the world goes insane.

  • The Great Culling: How Civilization Engineered the Modern Male

    Somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE, something strange happened to the human genome. Specifically, the Y chromosome.

    Over a 2,000-year stretch, human genetic diversity experienced a massive contraction. At one point, only about 1 in 20 men were reproducing. That means 95% of male lineages vanished…poof…gone. Most men alive today descend from a shockingly narrow slice of the male population that lived during that window.

    So…what the hell happened?

    Civilization happened.

    Not in the TED Talk sense…with aqueducts, murals, and democracy, but in the REAL sense…with hierarchy, slavery, and reproductive monopoly.

    The dawn of social stratification. More specifically, the sorting and discarding of people under systems of control. Yet more specifically, men controlling and flattening each other, themselves, women, and their environments with castes and dynasties, priesthoods and palaces, slavery and statehood, patrilineal inheritance, and elite polygyny (harems). And a certain kind of man systematically slaughtering every other kind of man.

    This wasn’t a simple population dip (women were still passing on their genes)…it was a selection event. And it coincides with when the process we call “civilization” was going into hyperdrive. Let that sink in for a moment. The selection event, where the genetic lines of 95 out of 100 men ended….wasn’t random. It was engineered by emerging systems that rewarded a very specific type of man…and erased the rest.

    Let’s be clear about what this means.

    When only a tiny elite of men get to reproduce (thanks to war, rape, slavery, or sheer status monopoly), you get a collapse in Y-chromosome diversity. Genetic drift goes wild. Founder effects explode. Suddenly, the behavioral and physiological traits of those few “winners” echo through the generations.

    What kinds of traits? What did the 5% of men still reproducing have in common?

    Well, to survive a slave system (on either side of the equation), you need emotional suppression. To survive a caste system? You need to be obedient to the hierarchy. A priesthood? Symbolic fluency (be good with complex bullshit). To reproduce in a monarchy? Performative loyalty.

    You simply don’t need egalitarianism, independence, or sensitivity to injustice. In fact, those traits will get you killed (or at least reproductively erased). It’s naive to think that a process like this just weeded out bodies…it weeded out minds.

    Over generations, civilization reshapes the species to favor male behaviors that reinforce civilized systems (status-seeking, dominance within rules, emotional control, strategic conformity). We call this “civilized” behavior. It sounds great, because it implies that the only alternative is (and was) resource-seeking, dominance without rules, little to no emotional control, and constant rebellion. But before we even explore whether that’s true, let’s acknowledge the fact that “civilized” behavior is nothing but system-optimized behavior, filtered through thousands of years of brutal selection.

    Meanwhile, female mitochondrial DNA (passed maternally) shows no such bottleneck. This means women kept reproducing across a much broader spectrum of lineages. The narrowing came from the top down, not the bottom up. Elite males reshaped the species by erasing vast swaths of it. A bit different from the civilizing / human self-domestication story you hear, isn’t it? The nicer people in the cave cooperating to get rid of the bullies? That happened, but the majority of the domestication story isn’t there. It’s in shackles, pits of bodies, chastity belts, slave raids, human sacrifices, and all manner of horrors.

    And it changed everything.

    It disrupted ancestral balances…between empathy and assertiveness, “wildness” and restraint, autonomy and obedience. It’s not something interesting side note. It altered hormonal profiles, sexual dimorphism, and the developmental timing of traits like aggression and cooperation. Civilization didn’t just change how we live…it reprogrammed what we are.

    And it looks a fuck of a lot like animal domestication. Bottlenecks, Enclosures. Selection for traits that serve the system, not the organism.

    The domestication of plants, animals, and people has implications that, when not accounted for in just about every important conversation we have in just about every field, results in the biggest example of decontextualization I can think of. Not acknowledging the maladaptively high level of attenuation of the modern human when discussing psychology, anthropology, history, sustainability, etc….means solutions simply aren’t found. The entire thing becomes self-referential.

    We’re not aware of what we are. We’re a domesticated phenotype…biologically tamed, groomed to perform in systems of symbolic order, no matter how insane that order becomes. And we try to find solutions within those insane systems. Solutions to the systems themselves, within the rules of the systems. It’s dizzying.

    We’re still living in the domesticating system. We operate inside its psychological architecture. And we carry the genetic consequences of a civilizational edit that decided which kinds of men would carry forward, and which kinds wouldn’t.

    The modern man isn’t just a descendant of random survivors. He isn’t a product of “survival of the fittest.” He’s the product of selective obedience. He’s a creature designed (quite literally) to fit the cage.

  • The Domesticated vs. The Wild

    Let’s have some fun. Imagine you’re an alien scientist, looking at domesticated humans and animals and their wild counterparts. You have no historical context…just the before-and-after. And your objective is to figure out what kind of selective pressure would explain the shift.

    You look at physical changes and note significant brain shrinkage and facial neoteny. You look at behavioral changes and note reduced reactivity (including reactive aggression) and increased compliance. You look at neurological changes and note less vigilance and more dependence. And you look at cognitive changes and note a greater tolerance for contradiction or command. Now you need to reverse-engineer the pressure that accounts for those changes.

    You’d conclude that attenuation was being rewarded not for survival, but for something like a tolerance of constraint. Reduced reactivity to imposed conditions that would normally trigger avoidance, protest, flight, or rupture.

    In domesticated (civilized) animals and people, it’s clear that attenuation is being rewarded for enabling them to do certain things. Namely, remain in proximity to unpredictable others, function under external control, inhibit instinctual responses to pain, crowding, or contradiction, and perform behaviors for social approval or symbolic reward…not direct need fulfillment.

    What if you were pressed to take a shot at describing the environment that produced such a pressure?

    If you had no cultural context and just observed the shift, you’d infer something like the following: a system that imposes artificial constraints, limits autonomy, suppresses immediate feedback, and rewards non-disruption. A system that rewards animals that don’t bolt at loud noises, humans who don’t resist moral contradiction, and minds that prioritize external signals (orders, rules, appearances) over internal ones (intuition, emotion, sensory experience). One that filters out traits that protest, question, disrupt, flee, or grieve.

    Your hypothesis might be something like, “Attenuation was being selected for to enable life inside an imposed system that contradicts natural feedback.” Of course, that’s the very definition of captivity, domestication…civilization.

    Now, you’re handed the conventional narrative. The history and anthropology books. The studies. You’d feel validated somewhat as you read the theory of human self-domestication…a process that “weeded out aggression” in favor of cooperation, social harmony, and prosocial behavior. But you’d also feel something was off. That this framing is deeply incomplete (and dangerously flattening). Because there’s no mention of the actual trade-offs.

    Let’s look at the conventional framing of human (self) domestication and see what it gets right.

    Anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists argue that early humans began to select against reactive aggression, especially in small bands where group (coalitionary) punishment could be used to ostracize or kill bullies. Over time, this likely contributed to facial feminization, reduced sexual dimorphism (differences between the sexes), and more juvenile (neotenous) behavior…hallmarks of “domestication syndrome.” Also, a reduction in testosterone-linked traits, stress-reactivity, and impulsivity…which likely made groups more stable/cohesive.

    What’s this framing missing?

    For one, I think it confuses (or leads people to confuse) submission with peace. Just because someone isn’t fighting back doesn’t mean the system is just. A domesticated animal isn’t peaceful, necessarily, it’s conditioned or selected not to protest. Likewise, a “civilized” human isn’t necessarily cooperative…they’re trained to suppress resistance. In other words, to the extent that we eliminated (reactive) aggression…we eliminated resistance to coercion.

    And it fails to distinguish between types of aggression. Reactive aggression (fight-or-flight, self-defense, boundary enforcement) was suppressed. Moral aggression (anger in response to injustice, betrayal, or cruelty) was pathologized (too sensitive or oppositional). But instrumental aggression (cold, planned, goal-oriented violence) is clearly rewarded in civilization. To the extent that it “succeeds,” it always has been.

    And the conventional explanation for human self-domestication doesn’t seem interested in what was lost. It treats the process as a moral victory. But I don’t think it was “bad behavior” that got weeded out…it was the ability to react honestly to harm. Domestication selected for attenuated perception, emotional buffering, and following symbolic rules…not any kind of inner peace. It reduced reactive violence while it reduced truthful response to violence. And I think the intention (of those driving the domestication process) was in the latter, with the former being largely inadvertent.

    Because we know that selecting for one behavioral trait (like tameness or compliance) cascades into structural, cognitive, sensory, and emotional changes. We know this. Traits aren’t modular. They’re entangled…especially when they involve the neural crest.

    The neural crest hypothesis of domestication (2014, Wilkins, Wrangham, Fitch) suggests that domestication syndrome in mammals is caused by mild deficits in neural crest cell development during embryogenesis.

    The neural crest contributes to all sorts of things…facial morphology (jaw, teeth, skull), adrenal glands (stress response), pigmentation, autonomic nervous system, peripheral nerves and glia, and parts of the limbic system (emotion, reactivity, threat detection).

    If you select for tameness (or, in humans, for docility/compliance), you’re not just changing a particular behavior…you’re reconfiguring the organism’s whole developmental trajectory. And here’s what you get:

    • Smaller brains
    • Flattened faces
    • Lower stress reactivity
    • Blunted sensory input
    • Neoteny (more juvenile traits retained into adulthood)
    • Reduced startle or protest response
    • Delayed or diminished emotional signaling

    Where does that show up in humans? Increased social pliability. Extended childhood dependence. Lower physiological sensitivity. Greater performance tolerance under contradictory or symbolic norms.

    In other words, your “modern human” wasn’t just bred to be nice…it was bred to feel less and to respond less to what would once have been danger, injustice, or disorder. That isn’t a linear trade. It’s a network-wide reorganization of the system (what Bateson would call a change in the system’s pattern of constraints).