Chapter 30

Domestication

This chapter is a kind of case study of an area of knowledge in which little progress

had been made before the era of modern bioinformatics. ¹ Domestic animals are

tremendously important to humanity. Presently, livestock constitutes more than ten

times the biomass of all wild mammals and somewhat exceeds the total human

biomass. Domestic animals are, therefore, inextricably involved in the fate of our

planet and deserve scientific attention. Moreover, domestication of both animals and

plants has greatly contributed to the development of human civilization. ²

“Domesticated” is undoubtedly a phenotype, yet applies to many diverse species

of animal. Behaviour is the most prominent phenotypic difference between wild and

domestic animals, yet other features such as typical coat colour, size, and morphology

also differentiate the domestic from the wild; some of them seem to be coincidental

to the essence of domestication as the outcome of some kind of selection; it is not

known to what extent genes influencing these features are linked. ³

The phylogeny (cf. Sect. 17.7) of dogs has been richly revealing, ⁴ confirming

the notion put forward by Konrad Lorenz that the earliest dogs arose alongside

hunter–gatherers, ⁵ but, surprisingly, showing that dogs are not as directly related to

present-day wolves as was formerly supposed.

Dogs are an especially fascinating subject because of their close relationship with

their human domesticators and the enormous amount of knowledge regarding the

behaviour of the hundreds of different breeds, the behavioural diversity of which is

1 See Alberto et al. (2018) and Moyers et al. (2015) for recent studies.

2 See Allaby et al. (2015) for a study of the genetics of plant domestication.

3 Wright (2015).

4 Freedman et al. (2014).

5 Lorenz (1965).

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J. Ramsden, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45607-8_30

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