The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

The paradox is that people can be incredibly peaceful and incredibly violent--sometimes the same people at different times. Wrangham notes the case of Scandinavia--from medieval Vikings to modern super-peaceful and orderly societies--and Rwanda--from peace to killing 10% of the population in 100 days, and then back to peace. Wrangham's explanation is that good and evil come, in part, from the same thing: the human ability to form coalitions to use violence to stop violence. He is an expert on chimpanzee aggression. Chimps are far more aggressive against their own kind than humans (or almost any other animal, for that matter). Why are humans different? Wrangham draws on a vast amount of ethnography to show that human societies routinely execute extremely bad actors--though he argues, strongly, that the death penalty has served its purpose and should be abandoned now. I am familiar with the ethnographic sources, and can confirm that most societies handle psychopaths and similar bad actors in a pretty final way, though often only when they have done a lot of damage. Common is a story in which four men go out hunting, three come back, and no one asks any questions. The problems with this as an explanation for human nonviolence are that 1) killing the violent is also violent, so just keeps the ball rolling, 2) the violent people often leave a lot of children before being rubbed out, and 3) Wrangham carefully and correctly notes that nonconformists are at least as likely to be executed as violent persons, leading to conformity rather than peace; often it's the evilly violent that kill the meek, mild nonconformists (as in the Salem witch trials--which he mentions). Thus, as a full explanation of human cooperation and nonviolence, execution does not make the grade. However, combined with other selective forces that made us more and more social and cooperative over time, it seems a valuable thing to emphasize.
Wrangham sees us as "self-domesticated." To me, as a specialist in ethnobiology (including domestication and the origins of agriculture), domestication refers to deliberate selection by humans, changing the genetics of the species in question from anything natural. By this standard, humans are somewhat domesticated, but not up there with dogs. Wrangham (in a particularly good discussion of domestication) notes that domestication routinely produces floppy ears, white spots, and other characteristic features we do not have; we do, however, have rather tame behavior, short jaws and crowded teeth, round smooth skulls, and other standard physical sequelae of domestication. And our behavior is more tranquil than a chimp's, but far less tranquil than a dog's or sheep's. So, we are a bit domestic, but not fully domesticated.
As someone with fair knowledge of such matters, I find this book both underestimates and overestimates human violence. Wrangham has not dealt with the full level of horror that hatred can bring about, in genocide and war, or with the constant low-level nastiness, spitefulness, and malignancy that feed into individual violence and murder. On the other hand, he has not dealt adequately with the levels of civility and peace that some societies maintain. The result of this is that he thinks in terms of average societies--especially the traditional ones, in which murder and local war are more common than in most modern states. This allows him to reduce the problem to one of violence handled by violent coalitions, and thus to a genetically guided, highly biological process. The reality is that humans swing dramatically from insane outbreaks of murder to total peace (my wife and I have studied this in Rwanda and Cambodia). Simple biology cannot explain this; we have to look at other factors, both innate and learned. In particular, we need to look much more at the cultural construction of the fight-flight-freeze response innate in all higher animals. Wrangham has made a good start, but psychology and cultural anthropology will have to weigh in to bring this start to fruition.

An anthropologist at Harvard University, Dr. Richard Wrangham has spent decades in the forests of Africa observing our primate cousins with Jane Goodall and others. He has overseen the PhDs of some of the most important current scholars in the field. He has authored or co-authored countless papers on violence, human evolution, primatology etc. But he isn’t just a field biologist. He also doubles as an armchair scholar, who like the late Stephen Jay Gould, voraciously digests historical works and cutting edge research in the attempt to solve the riddles of what makes us human.

All this scholarship and gumboot fieldwork is evident in Wrangham’s new book, The Goodness Paradox, where he not only walks the walk but he talks the talk.

With his latest work, however, Wrangham knows he has a very big (and dangerous) fish on the line. Turning each page, we can almost feel him tingling with excitement as he reels this fish in. But at the same time, he writes like he is tiptoeing around a pit of rattlers. Certainly aware of the political consequences of this big idea and far too battle-scarred from the attacks of often lesser scholars, Wrangham tends toward understatement and nuance. And so while the book is a jarring and exciting page turner, he does write a bit like Charles Darwin might – “just the facts, ma’am.” As a result, a number of lay readers (as well as even rock star scholars like John Hawks) will fail to notice Wrangham’s forest of earth-shattering-revelation as he takes us on a journey through the trees of supporting evidence. But for those who can get past Wrangham’s timidity (for example, its hard to come up with a title more banal than “The Goodness Paradox”) they will be justly rewarded. This is a very important work.

So what is this big fish? What is the central idea? Well, Wrangham has decided to tackle (and resolve) one of the central unsolved questions of human evolution and moral philosophy: the goodness paradox. Or in other words, why are humans altruistic?

Indeed, since Darwin’s time and before, philosophers and scientists have ripped out their hair over this seemingly simple question. Why are humans occasionally moral? Why are we kind? Why is it that a lone traveler can stroll into an unfamiliar pub in an unfamiliar town and occasionally make fast friends over drinks, a game of pool, or small talk? Why is it that humans donate to charity, organize choral groups that sing “Deck the Halls” in the middle of snowstorms, write reviews (like this one) online, or hold the door open for even a disgruntled stranger?

Sure, as Wrangham readily acknowledges, we humans have our moments of violence as well. We square off and fight in even the most seemingly docile scenarios. Stabbings, murder, nuclear bombs and rape still occur. But compared with other species – bighorn rams, lions, army ants and honeybees, for example – we are far more peaceful and even…ahem…kind. Overwhelmingly, as a species, we are much more likely to accept a stranger than most other animals on earth. We often even go out of our way to help.

This question of altruism (and peaceful cooperation) is especially confounding because natural selection is predicated on ideas of shortsighted selfishness. So, long-term models which suggest that if I help a stranger today in the hopes that the same stranger might help me in a year or two, don’t quite add up. And models which rely on group selection (instead of focusing on the individual) also fail. Thus, if I help one stranger in the expectation that some other stranger might help me in return, I am participating in a form of ‘group’ selection. But to satisfy the theories of natural selection, reciprocation cannot be crowd-sourced and it cannot be delayed over long stretches of time. This is because we find that random strangers, even those who live in the same town, don’t share enough genes to predicate the sharing of food, the high-fives in bars or donations to Save the Children.

As such, the goodness paradox has been a deep thorn in the side of the best scholars. It has confounded folks like Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Haidt, Stephen Pinker, Frederich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant and others. Even today, this question of morality is central to the frenzied – and wildly popular – debates of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). And millions of viewers tune in to see the YouTube battles between Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Carlson and others – which focus almost exclusively on morality. Nevertheless, the IDW offerings often feel squirmy, biologically inconsistent and uncertain. And they fall into the familiar traps, attempting to explain morality and altruism in a way that isn’t based on shortsighted selfishness. Their failure, however, to do so, leaves them grappling for things like meditation, cultural institutions and even divinity.

Miraculously, Wrangham squares this circle. He does this by flipping the old arguments on their head. He asserts that we have made a fundamental mistake by viewing human evolution entirely through the lens of "natural" selection. While this will strike some readers as a possible turn toward the metaphysical, it is not. Instead, Wrangham suggests the unthinkable. He claims that when it comes to investigating the evolutionary history of humanity we must also incorporate the notions of breeding and domestication (domestication is not the same as tameness, as domestication means a significant modification of the genes). Indeed, we humans have somehow managed to domesticate ourselves. And so just as humans have reprogrammed the DNA of wolves to make dogs, we have also, over the past 300,000 years, culled/eliminated many of the most violent traits of our ancestors. This, as a result, has made us human.

The secret sauce here is capital punishment. Since the dawn of homo erectus and perhaps longer, Wrangham suggests that men have formed associations of police-like, violent men, who took it as their responsibility to hunt down and kill other assassins, thieves, traitors and rapists. Therefore, via the millennia of firing squads, guillotines, drownings, burnings, gallows etc., the genes of humans slowly evolved into what we see now, people who can ride together peacefully on a bus or wait in line for movie tickets. Indeed, as Wrangham shows compellingly in the book, modern humans have self-selected our own genes in such a way that we show biological patterns that are consistent only with those of other domesticated animals.

Thus, while warfare pushed us to form tighter and more powerful groups, capital punishment is the evolutionary force that drove us to be kinder within our group, to become moral – genetically. Thus, this morality and the resulting altruism don’t need to be inculcated by catechism or lecture. We are not blank slates. Instead, Wrangham shows us that it is there, built in to our genes and apparent in the youngest kids.

But the reader can almost feel sorry for Wrangham, as his conclusions are so incendiary. This notion that warfare might make us gregarious or that capital punishment makes us kind, is not going to be swallowed easily by the masses. And while Wrangham is careful not to use the word ‘eugenics’ for fear of a massive backlash, this is precisely what his ideas suggest. Self-domestication is a slower and slightly less organized form of eugenics via capital punishment. Ugh!

Now, of course, capital punishment has enormous downsides. Wrangham acknowledges that there has been inordinate injustice along the way. Millions of humans have been slaughtered during war or executed by unjust tyrants. Hordes of innocent people have been burned at the stake. Millions of others have been killed for sexual preferences, religious choices, race or heresy. And this ignores the ethical problem of taking any human’s life for any reason at all. But Wrangham is hardly ignorant of these concerns. Indeed, he too finds the results abhorrent.

But Wrangham is a scientist. And so his argument is based on notions of statistics and population genetics. So, if we look at humans in the same regard as how we view dandelions, without a concern for false positives, without a concern for notions of murder or the death penalty, what does the science say? Well, building on ideas worked out with Christopher Boehm, Wrangham merely suggests that a statistically significant amount of dictatorial alpha males, pyschopathic murderers and inconsiderate jerks have been removed from the gene pool to produce a species that is domesticated in much the same way that water buffalos, cows, dogs and other domesticates are. Thus, enormous amounts of group violence, perpetrated by other violent humans to lynch public offenders has made us into a less-violent species. And we end up with this eerie co-evolution – a feedback loop created by our increased desire to kill offenders (capital punishment) and our increased sense of altruism and morality. A survival of the friendliest hangmen.

For classical Darwinists, the revolution here is that Wrangham has turned ‘natural’ selection on its head, by reintroducing an ‘artificial’ component to the evolution of man. This is a fantastic twist. Because Darwin, working in the mid-1800s, named his theory ‘natural’ selection in order to make an important distinction. He wanted to underline the notion that man wasn’t the only force when it comes to breeding animals. Via drought, fire, starvation, competition etc., Mother Nature was just as ruthless in the ‘culling’ of her various breeds as those who raised pigeons for sport.

Indeed, it appears that Darwin learned far more about ‘natural’ selection in England than he ever did while riding tortoises in the Galapagos. Via his membership in the popular (and elitist) gentlemen breeding clubs in the UK, Darwin spent decades studying the methods of breeders. And Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species reflects this. He dedicates significant ink to the way man had, over generations, artificially modified the inherited traits of domestic pigeons, racehorses and dogs via the ruthless ‘selection’ of breeders. But the implications were clear to anyone familiar with the barbaric tactics of animal breeders.

Because of this discomfort and surefire backlash, Darwin (like Wrangham) also tempered his words. Darwin avoided using terms like ‘slaughter,’ ‘carnage’ or ‘bloodshed’ so as not to disturb the energetic animal rights activists of his time. Nevertheless, Darwin’s genius was that he saw that the carnage involved in breeding was not just overwhelming but necessary. Indeed, the vast majority of the offspring of any breeder were quickly buried or converted into fodder for pigs. For each winning greyhound, for example, tens of thousands of slower pups were put to death. For each cute and cuddly lapdog thousands of other, less-cuddly dogs were culled. Darwin saw this and understood its importance, but he couldn’t mention it explicitly in his work.

Still, to Darwin, these ruthless breeders of the mid 1800s really understood evolution. And this was evident in how they described their work. While today, we might refer to this rather gruesome process of euthanizing the imperfect as animal husbandry or breeding, in Darwin’s time it was referred to simply as ‘artificial selection.’ To Darwin, the point was clear. By placing the term ‘artificial’ in the name, the breeders sought to distinguish their actions as ‘artificial’ and distinct from those of Mother Nature. Thus, inherent in their 19th century lexicon was the notion that there were two important types of selection, one was man-made and another was natural. And so Darwin wasn’t breaking new ground when in 1859, he dubbed his theory ‘natural’ selection. Instead he was simply noting that the ruthless savagery of Mother Nature was akin to that of the breeders. And while these breeders might have appeared to be barbaric, Darwin’s contribution was to note how exceptionally vicious Mother Nature was in her craft, as well.

Indeed, we now know that in the wild, of the 20 million or so eggs spawned by one female cod, on average only two survive to adulthood. Even majestic lions – the powerful apex predators – produce a dozen cubs for every one that lives to adulthood. The others die of starvation, predation, infanticide and disease. Nature (just like Darwin’s friends, the gentlemen breeders of London) is indeed ‘red in tooth and claw.’

But where some might not be able to get past the misery, Darwin found the results to be glorious. Everything that he had considered to be so beautiful – the motions of eagles as they fly, the stunning beauty of orchids in bloom or giraffes in stride – were all sculpted by this process of death.

The central insight of Wrangham and Boehm is to simply apply this same level of suffering to the construction of altruism, cooperation and morality. For every lion cub or eaglet that died to produce the majestic creatures of today, so too must a violent human psychopath be put to death. Just as the Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev produced friendly foxes by simply removing the violent and antisocial foxes, humans have ruthlessly executed and lynched many of the most violent humans and have thus removed their genes from the gene pool.

This notion that humans have self-domesticated through capital punishment is the central genius of this book. By killing large numbers of selfish, violent and abusive outliers, humans have become more cohesive, cooperative, docile and friendly (and at the same time, more willing to form groups dedicated to lynching violent offenders). And more importantly, Wrangham has squared the circle in that altruistic actions can now be reimagined as purely selfish acts – the sine qua non of natural selection. Humans act in altruistic ways not because of religion or culture, but instead because they have been genetically programmed to be terrified of getting lynched for appearing selfish and cruel. We frantically groom our friendships and defend ourselves against accusations. Honor in a world of capital punishment is everything. The goodness paradox has been solved.

But one can only imagine how much Wrangham struggled to present this terrifying notion. How nervous he must have been to write about the benefits of capital punishment, genocide and eugenics. He surely wrestled with all the possible interpretations and surefire backlash he would receive if he expressed these ideas as clearly as he could have. After all Darwin is still under fire.

And so Wrangham has no choice but to dance around the issues in terror like one might dance around a fire. He incorporates endless amounts of research, history and data. He takes forever to get to his point. Still, while he is both a gifted writer and scholar, all this dervish-like dancing can and does mislead. Indeed in the many reviews I have read of the book, it is clear that the reviewers missed the point. They were seduced by Wrangham’s periphery ideas on the various types of violence, his feminist treatment of bonobos, how humans form coalitions or how chimps will both cooperate to kill each other or participate in group hunts.

Those who have reviewed the book appear to be blind to Wrangham’s terror. They fail to see how fearful he is to present his point. And so, distracted by all of Wrangham’s distractions, they fail to see how capital punishment, genocide and war have likely caused the subsequent rise in peaceful urban settings, morality, government and even religious-type tendencies. They fail to see that in The Goodness Paradox, Wrangham has solved some of the biggest problems in philosophy and biological evolution. He has delivered a masterpiece.

IN SHORT: This is one of the most important books on human evolution since Darwin. The Goodness Paradox will also demand change in other fields, including psychology and moral philosophy. It is masterfully written by one of the most important insiders of the field.

****

I do have a couple minor gripes. None of these challenge any of Wrangham’s central conclusions. But, they could raise concerns for future study:

1. I see little reason for Wrangham to insist that these actions of self-domestication began just a mere 300,000 years ago when we see so many of the characteristics that he talks about in chimpanzees. Indeed, Wrangham himself documented many of these chimp traits (grooming, friendship, justice, cooperative hunting and murder). Clearly, he finds the 300k date convenient. It allows him to use the extensive fossil record of Neanderthals to make many of his physiological claims of domestication. And those comparisons are convincing. But the process of domestication appears to show deep and clear roots with both bonobos and chimpanzees, which suggest that even Neanderthals (Wrangham’s comparison species) were partially domesticated. Most unusual is that in Chapter 12 Wrangham writes, “tendencies for war are strongly influenced by psychological adaptations that evolved in the Pleistocene.” Thus Wrangham is suggesting that the big changes occurred long after humans split from chimps. But, again, we see the roots of all these cooperative behaviors in Chimps. While male chimps don’t appear to communicate when they form their coalitions to hunt or go to war, something does happen in those moments. And if there was no communication, this coordination would be impossible.

2. Wrangham appears to overlook some obvious benefits of warfare. In chap 12 Wrangham digs into the evolutionary reasons for going to battle. He writes “…soldiers go into battle because they are obedient, whereas in reality two other reasons are more important. One is found when fighting can actually improve the chance of survival… [and the other is] to avoid incurring the contempt of close companions.” But while it has never been observed with chimpanzees (or in wolves), rape is another very important and clearly beneficial outcome of war to the male perpetrators.

3. Wrangham often assumes that mutations are a two-way street where gene loss and gene creation happen at about the same speed. But that is a big mistake. We know that gene loss, via deleterious mutations is very easy and in the absence of purifying selection occurs quickly. The opposite however (to improve genetic traits via mutation) is a very slow process. Thus, once a gene is knocked out, it is far more likely to continue to erode, not suddenly recreate itself. This mistake is observable in a couple places. In chap 4, Wrangham writes “Only about 80 generations had been needed to produce aspects of the domestication syndrome; after 50 generations in the wilds of Belarus, the mink had shown no reversal to wild anatomy.” Later, he writes “Dingoes are descended by thousands of generations from domesticated dogs, but even after at least five thousand years back in the wild, they have brains no larger than those of dogs. Dingoes’ brains have not reverted to being large and wolf-like.”

Further, Wrangham appears to miss an obvious connection between purifying selection and aggression. Both warfare and male violence likely have their roots in purifying selection. Because humans (and to some extent chimpanzees) have managed to escape the circles of predator/prey which dictate the lives of most animals, they need some other way to eliminate the enormous influx of deleterious mutations that occurs each generation. While this notion that deleterious mutations could be drivers of evolution is fairly new and obscure (see Alex Kondrashov), the math of it is hard to ignore. In the absence of intense species competition, the accumulation of deleterious mutations can quickly lead to a species’ demise. Warfare is one important solution. Capital punishment is likely another.

I gave this book 4 stars because I admire the author's ambitious efforts to use an evolutionary perspective to tackle fundamental questions about human behavior from the beginnings of our species to modern societies. The "Goodness Paradox" of the title refers to humans' inherent tendencies to behave in cooperative (and sometimes very altruistic) ways vs. participating in organized forms of violence toward others outside their communities. Recorded human history has seen almost incessant warfare in various forms, and even most hunter-gatherer communities seem to also have engaged in high levels of warfare. On the other hand, we have advanced our culture and knowledge while generally controlling criminal and anti-social activities. Professor Wrangham explains this paradox with an innovative "Self-Domestication" theory. As I understand this, humans first emerged 300,000 years ago in Africa as a separate species equipped with the ability, unlike chimpanzees, to co-exist and cooperate (with low levels of aggression) within tribal groups, while able to be effective hunters and killers of animals and competitors. Various means were used to control anti-social behavior, most notably killing the most aggressive offenders within the group or tribe. However, this theory leaves me unconvinced because some important questions remain unanswered:
1) Why did it take Homo sapiens 250,000 years to be able to travel out of Africa, and to colonize the world while successfully competing against other human species (Neanderthals), who were larger, stronger, and better adapted to colder climates? Evolution must have provided modern humans (perhaps at several points in time) with important improved intellectual abilities involving language and cognitive skills. Do we know with any certainty how these biological advances affected human behavior, including cooperation and violence?
2) If we are inherently less aggressive within our own communities because of 300,000 years of "self-domestication," then why do most modern societies need a heavily armed police force, plus extensive laws & criminal justice systems? Capital punishment has been used frequently in human history until the last century to punish violent criminals, but we still have violent crime today. As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen if our police force went on strike for a month.
3) Even if we accept the premise that humans are less aggressive within their own communities, does this really matter if we continue killing each other in wars without end? The author's visit to Auschwitz is described at the end of the book, as he contemplates the horrors of WW2. Are we really confident that this scale of killing will not happen again?
Despite my questions about his theory, I think that the author does offer an important message that we do have free will, and choices about our behavior, and that we need to make conscious efforts as a society to reduce organized violence. I hope that this book will help in this cause.

Two decades ago Richard Wrangham wrote an excellent book called Demonic Males, covering some of the attributes in primates and other mammals that hold up an evolutionary mirror to what men do. Stephen Gould responded in his typical orthodox Marxist anger at anything suggesting we inherit some behaviors and tendencies in the genes that get us rolling, just as Gould and Lewontin unjustly besmirched E.O. Wilson two decades earlier.

Now Wrangham has the laugh last -- he wrote a gripping overview of much of his life's research (and that of some of his colleagues), and guides the reader through a fascinating description why he thinks homo sapiens domesticated itself, just as it has domesticated dogs and numerous barnyard animals.

Not to spoil a superb read, all I'll add is that, in a sense, it is unfortunate the process Wrangham outlines does not consistently get applied nowadays (in a civilized way, of course) to bullies like Gould; the history of science will no doubt take care of that over time.

In the meantime, this book firmly puts Mr. Wrangham in very good company with respect to thinking about and studying evolution. Thank you, sir.

The book is very good, but it has several distinct flaws. First, the writing is poor. Although some allowance must be made for the author being a scientist, it is hard to believe that his clumsy prose would pass muster in a first-year expository writing course at his university. Second, many arguments meander, to the reader’s great frustration. A tighter focus would have improved the final product considerably. Third, the author does not hesitate to introduce a deus ex machina whenever he runs into trouble (“the mysterious dawning of a language facility” several hundred thousand years ago bears a lot of weight in this book). Fourth, the argument turns to rank speculation when applied to the most salient conflicts of human history (what the author calls “complex war”). If one reads the book as just a theory and watches closely for the unsupported extrapolations, it is nonetheless informative and satisfying.

Interesting book. However, the assertion that human self-domestication is based in the control of aggression (via capital punishment, no less) is predicated on a bias that evolution is primarily a masculine endeavor. The survival and possible self-domestication of the human species is also surely based in the capacity to ensure survival of the young. Reproduction must be followed by survival of the young for evolution to proceed. The development of capacities for bonding, protection and nurture of immature beings must also have some evolutionary advantage that also contributes to the selection of qualities of cooperation and other virtues in human evolution. The masculine bias here leads to the omission of an entire stream of important evidence from studies of both primates and humans.

That one could write a book about human paradox of good and violence without mentioning the large body of work by René Girard (and the philosophical anthropology that emerged from his thought) is utterly mystifying.

Wrangham needs to read the work of Rene Girard.

I just read this for the author’s take on the matter. I would soon be disappointed, though.

The main reason were the generalizations. While those are inevitable, those have no place in academic writing.
Then again, that’s better than downplaying the severity of school shootings or comparing us to animals in terms of violence. (How does either help us?)

Speaking of generalizations, I decided to mention dogs. I don't doubt most of them, even the so-called "dangerous breeds", can make great pets. However, I doubt that they should all be put into a box for some simple reason: aggression is species-specific. That's why it's possible for Fido to like humans yet not other dogs. Or even a Golden Retriever can play all day with kids and still hunt a fox.

At one point, the author states that dolphins copulate for fun. There’s no doubting that when it’s been proven.
He later asserts the same of all animals. Did he not realize the reader would notice such a huge discrepancy? Not to mention, that feline copulation doesn’t seem fun the moment you learn about their sensitive areas.

That said, I can’t fault him when it comes to Alexander the Great. I went my whole life thinking him dying of malaria was hard fact. That was until I did a little research, and read that’s just one of many possibilities.

On the other hand, I found it interesting to learn about biases such as ones about the inaction. I’d be hard-pressed to call them reasonable because passivity only encourages the aggressor. I have considered this a possibility as to why some authors set out making a protagonist then never have them take the initiative.

I also went through this whole book thinking that the author approved of capital punishment. That was until he listed many valid reasons for wanting it abolished. And these are reasons I would cite. That meant nothing the moment he insisted that capital punishment removed the most aggressive individuals. It came off as parroting since it should already be established that some people aren’t overt about it.

All that being said, I found out that there are some facts in here. They just happened to be buried beneath so much speculation and opinion. It soon got to the point, this might as well be an extended opinion piece.

the theory of why we are less agressive as a species - due to domisticaiton