The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin & Giles Laurén

Author:Charles Galton Darwin & Giles Laurén [Darwin, Charles Galton & Laurén, Giles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780985081140
Publisher: SOPHRON
Published: 2012-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

VII. MAN – A WILD ANIMAL

In the past two chapters I have examined different aspects of the nature of man. In the first he was regarded just like any other species of wild animal, while in the second some of his social qualities were considered, which might not be regarded as those of a wild animal. Civilization might, loosely speaking, be counted as a sort of domestication, in that it imposes on man conditions not at all typical of wild life. It might then at least be argued that it is a false analogy to compare man to a wild animal, but that he should rather be compared to one which has been domesticated. I shall maintain that this analogy would be false, and that man is and will always continue to be essentially a wild and not a tame animal.

Before coming to this main theme it is important to notice that, if it were admissible to regard man as a domesticated animal, the whole time-scale of history would have to be radically altered. Thus though the geological evidence shows that it takes a million years to make a new wild species, we know that the various domesticated animals have been created in a very much shorter time. For example, the ancestors of the greyhound and the bulldog of ten thousand years ago would probably have been quite indistinguishable. If then man's characteristics could be similarly remoulded in so short a time, the whole, future of history might be radically different. It would become impossible to forecast man's future after as short a period as ten thousand years, hardly longer than the span of known past history, instead of the million years which holds if he is a wild animal.

In the first place, it is necessary to be clear as to what is meant by a wild or a tame animal. We are apt sometimes to call an animal wild because it is dangerous to man, and to call it tame because it is harmless, but this is a slovenly way of speaking, and here I shall use the word “tame" simply as a synonym for "domesticated" which I think is its true meaning. A tame animal then is one that does the will of a master, and the savage watch-dog, trained to bite all intruders, is tamer than the friendly terrier which sometimes slips away to do its own private hunting. All tame animals owe their qualities to centuries of selective breeding, and it must always be remembered that the changes made in them owe nothing to the inheritance of acquired characters, but are due to the selection for breeding of those individual animals which show to the highest degree natural characteristics useful to their masters.

A chief feature in domesticated animals has been the creation of a great variety of breeds, each specialised for some particular purpose, either practical or aesthetic. Each breed far excels its wild ancestry in the quality for which it has been bred, so that

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