The more I learn about animal husbandry the more I have to acknowledge that humans are and have been domesticating themselves. Which isn’t entirely as bad as it sounds, necessarily. But the repeated observation of multiple domesticated species is that they become more and more dependent on human interventions (antibiotics, deworming, artificial insemenation, fences, feed troughs, incubation or hand raising of offspring, interventions during birth to save the mother or offspring) Some of these are the unintended consequences of focused selective breeding for one feature at the exclusion of all others, but others are more insidious as the farmer is just trying to protect his bottom line here and there. And for the humans species I see the interventions all around us. We use antibiotics, we intervene during child birth to save the mother and child, we of course take medications for parasites, and many other ailments. We provide IVF and other amazing treatments. We live in cities we eat at restaurants instead of gathering the food or prepairing it. I do these things too, I believe at least one of my kids would be dead if we did not do these interventions. And if we needed to use IVF I wouldn’t hesitate, and all the other things and yet I can not help but clearly see that we are weakening our species genetic pool. And in time we will become more and more dependent on these interventions for more and more people. I don’t like the implications or the predicted outcomes.

#grownostr #genetics #evolution