A recent New York Times story described an experiment involving two colonies of rats. The first was bred for tameness. The second colony, “bred from exactly the same stock,” was wired to be aggressive. The results were described as the “sweetest cartoon animal” and “the most evil super-villain.” Whereas the tame rats poked their noses through the cage to be petted, the others would “hurl themselves screaming toward their bars.”
The researchers' goal in breeding lovable and villainous rats was to understand how human beings domesticated previously wild animals like horses and cattle. They hypothesize that the characteristic that made domestication possible, tameness, is genetic in origin. Breeding tame and aggressive rat colonies is a step toward identifying what they call a “tameness gene,” which they presume is “the same in all species of domesticated mammals.”
If the article had stopped there, it would have been interesting in a National Geographic sort of way. But they then went on to speculate that humans might possess such a “tameness gene,” and that this gene contributed to our “domestication.” The theory goes that those with the “tameness gene” “penalized or ostracized individuals who were too aggressive.”
Let’s set aside the obvious objection that there’s no proof that such a gene exists in rats, much less humans. The bigger problem, as one science writer put it, is the idea that human civilization is the product of a hypothetical “nice rat, nasty rat,” or in this case, “nice human, nasty human,” gene.
[This is] slandering humans whether by reducing our vices and virtues to genetic determinism or by comparing us to laboratory rats.
(This update courtesy of the Breakpoint with Chuck Colson.)
