Last week I noted that it was important for those who wanted to claim that natural selection was at work and influential in the human population to pretend that human beings were "wild animals" incoherently citing domesticated dogs, domesticated in artificial conditions imposed on dogs and, presumably, their near-dog ancestors in their arguments, which, by definition, are not "wild dogs" but "tame dogs".
The problems for citing the "traits" of tame animals which result from the selections made by people in an assertion of NATURAL selection in operation before human beings and human cultures were there to produce tame animals don't seem to be noticed much by such folk UNLESS IT IS IN THEIR INTEREST TO SUDDENLY NOTICE SUCH A DISTINCTION. That is the sort of dishonest double counterpoint at work in eugenics and, I would assert, in the assertion of natural selection as a force of nature. And it was there from the beginning with Darwin's citations of domesticated animals to lend plausibility to his theory of natural selection.
As soon as the selections in domestication of animals are made by humans are made, consciously, with a goal of some kind in mind, using human judgement and what human beings have managed to discern in such matters from our limited powers of observation and analysis, the claims of it representing what happens in nature is inevitably false. Our choices and our analyses of the results are restricted by the limited scope of human capabilities and human understanding. Nature does not have our limitations or our predilections such as those in both the breeding of animals for our use and using them in a formal and self-interested construction of an explanation of the workings of nature. I would add that I think the even more radically limited scope of even human experience that is allowable in scientific consideration adds another and far more restrictive filter on what is allowed to be considered in the matter, a filter which doesn't exist in life in nature.
Those filters might serve extremely well for discerning some of the relevant and useful facts about atoms, molecules, non-living physical objects and the nature of their motions and changes under different physical conditions. Such things are rather limited in their variation and modes of existence as compared to living organisms. The restrictions under which living organisms can continue as living organisms and reproduce should have, I think, rather been a hint that using the same kinds of observations that you do for non-living objects will not be as good a match in many, perhaps most aspects of the scientific study of life.
But in order to be taken as a science, biologists needed to shoe-horn life into the same kind of procedures and methods that worked so well for physics and chemistry in the last several centuries, even when addressing something as unsuited to that reductionist program as behaviors and consciousness which have such a large, presumed role in the evolution of animals which can behave and put themselves in different situations which impinge on their living to reproduce or not.
The problem is that it's all based in pretenses of being able to do things that can't be done, none of those so obvious as the impossibility of seeing animals in the past, discerning which organisms did what, how they did it, the conditions under which they did it, whether or not those behaviors led to death or a reduction in the numbers of successful offspring those behaviors produced. The behaviors, themselves, not being known to have existed in that past, never mind any physical basis for their inheritance or their survival in radically different environmental contexts, especially when those are imagined as if uninfluenced by other factors.
Often, while listening to assertions connecting aspects of human societies to those of ants and bees, I wondered why other modern families of animals whose connection to the ants and bees is a common ancestor we share with them, don't seem to have examples of the same social behavior contended to be the common heritage from that common ancestor. Amphibians are such an example of animals which, presumably, share the common ancestor with ants that we do but which I can't seem to recall exhibiting "the same genetically coded behavior" as we are alleged to share with ants, presumably through the same ancestor. I can't locate it in the reptiles or other classes presumed to have been descended from that same common ancestor. Only, I'm sure, some evolutionary psychologist or Sociobiologist will come up with some purported "thing" asserted to be a tenuous strand of similarity, the creative imagination of such guys being always, remarkably able to find confirmation of their theory and, somehow, never seem to come up with stories that refute them. What are the odds of that happening?
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I haven't been able to do as much reading on this as I'd like to but I'm finding that there is actual evidence that human domestication of animals as near to the wild as the first generation of fish raised by humans or release into the wild already are removed from the conditions they would face in nature, with results that alter the population from those of natural fish, with resulting differences in reproductive rates in the wild. For example, there is this paper.
Captive breeding programs are widely used for the conservation and restoration of threatened and endangered species. Nevertheless, captive-born individuals frequently have reduced fitness when reintroduced into the wild. The mechanism for these fitness declines has remained elusive, but hypotheses include environmental effects of captive rearing, inbreeding among close relatives, relaxed natural selection, and unintentional domestication selection (adaptation to captivity). We used a multigenerational pedigree analysis to demonstrate that domestication selection can explain the precipitous decline in fitness observed in hatchery steelhead released into the Hood River in Oregon. After returning from the ocean, wild-born and first-generation hatchery fish were used as broodstock in the hatchery, and their offspring were released into the wild as smolts. First-generation hatchery fish had nearly double the lifetime reproductive success (measured as the number of returning adult offspring) when spawned in captivity compared with wild fish spawned under identical conditions, which is a clear demonstration of adaptation to captivity. We also documented a tradeoff among the wild-born broodstock: Those with the greatest fitness in a captive environment produced offspring that performed the worst in the wild. Specifically, captive-born individuals with five (the median) or more returning siblings (i.e., offspring of successful broodstock) averaged 0.62 returning offspring in the wild, whereas captive-born individuals with less than five siblings averaged 2.05 returning offspring in the wild. These results demonstrate that a single generation in captivity can result in a substantial response to selection on traits that are beneficial in captivity but severely maladaptive in the wild.
If that is true for fish bred under those conditions for one generation, presumably controlled in some attempt to make them fit for success in the wild, the idea that the conditions of animals at the end of many hundreds of generations of more highly controlled and manipulated breeding of a line of mammals bred with a specific goal of human beings in mind is going to give you a good model to draw conclusions about unrelated species in actual uncontrolled nature doesn't seem to have much to back it up. I hope to be able to read more on the topic to see how much work has been done on this but nothing I've seen so far lead me to believe that the results of human breeding are comparable to those in nature, without such intelligent manipulation. The reasonable conclusion to draw is that there is no reason for confidence that animals kept and bred under artificial conditions under conscious human control are going to tell you anything reliable about wild animals of even the same species. The best you could do is look at wild animals and see if they do the same thing as your captive animals, but the confirmation of that in the wild comes from the wild population.
And there is no species which has longer been under the control of human breeding outside of purely wild conditions than human beings. In recorded human history and presumably for some time into the period before records are preserved, many of the choices in reproduction under entirely artificial conditions, under entirely artificial rules and restrictions, often forced against choices of the individuals, other people making those decisions for them and restricting their range of choices. I'm unaware of that happening anywhere in nature. The assertion that "natural selection" is applicable to the human population is nonsense*.
The idea that the human population of the 19th century or today can be reasonably understood as if they were "wild animals" and their offspring reasonably evaluated by artificial HUMAN theories of animals in the wild would seem to not be justified. The Darwins and Haeckels don't seem to have understood that even the people they constantly referred to as "savages" didn't live under the same wild conditions as even our closest ape relations could be said to but lived in human societies, under human laws and customs, taking advantage of the products of human culture and human thinking as much as they and the great unwashed who they clearly hated and feared would live too long and have too many children in Britain and Germany. Their sense of superiority, their class assumptions and their racism all blinded them to seeing those things as they were, their science surrounding those, the product of their unadmitted biases, prejudices and limitations.
The needs of biologists, especially those such as Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and, yes, Charles Darwin, whose thinking was radically influenced by their lives, their formal education, their acculturation into the milieu of 19th century, British and German science, to see things in accord with what they knew and how they felt, makes any assertion about things open to unacknowledged, unadmitted influences. The opportunity to insert those influences in science is enhanced when the subject they are dealing with is largely unobservable and dealing with extremely complex entities whose observed behavior must be interpreted by those same minds which have such a hard time imagining alternatives to their own experiences.
That is what is behind the success with which eugenics was introduced into, first science, then the world of politics and the law, from where forced sterilization, unequal provision for education and pay, and everything up to and including mass murder. From the introduction of eugenics in Galton's first articles in 1865 to the end of the Nazi period in 1945 is a mere 80 years, the lifetime many of us might reasonably be expected to reach. The period between the beginning of eugenics and the first forced-sterilization laws under it was a mere forty-two years. I can't find when the first university classes in the subject were started but eugenics was full blown science with the entire compliment of academic support and legal influence far earlier. I've noted how George Darwin was calling for laws forcibly annulling marriages in the 1870s in influential magazines and could note that even earlier Heinrich Fick in Germany was, as well, advocating molding laws in accord with enhancing natural selection in his country. The power behind eugenics was first the repute that Charles Darwin and natural selection enjoyed, I would say due to the good news for wealthy men that it was but also for materialist men, and second the ease with which it fit with the prejudices and experience of the affluent class of men who had control of science and academic institutions. It was good news for all of them and they were not inclined to think with sufficient rigor about what it was claiming.
When the topic of science is extremely complex and most of it will never be available for study, the tendency is to cut corners and allow lesser standards of evidence because, well, for no better reason than that "it's hard". That might be fairly innocuous at times, when the topic is human life or death, equality, morality, the topic is too important to allow that relaxed standard to those who want to make those claims.
* The idea that "natural selection" exists outside of human imagination is, as well, susceptible to reasonable disbelief for many of these same reasons.
Update: Since I am again made aware that even many people with university degrees, even some of those who have degrees in the relevant biological topics don't realize that there is difference between natural selection and evolution or have an emotional block on facing that obvious fact, I will assert again that evolution is a far more certain fact than any purported explanation of how or why it happened. Biology and, even more so, the popular understanding of science has put the Darwin wagon before the engine, evolution, for so long a lot of people don't realize the real relationship between them. They seem to think the wagon is doing all the pulling.
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