White men domesticated themselves

Discover mag reports:

The so-called self-domestication hypothesis, floated by Charles Darwin and formulated by 21st century scholars, is now popular among anthropologists. They see parallels between changes over the past 200,000 years of human evolution and those observed when wild animals became domesticates, creatures selectively bred to be docile and friendly.

According to proponents, as human societies grew in size and complexity, more cooperative, less combative individuals fared better. These behavioral traits are heritable to some extent and also linked with physical traits, such as stress hormone levels, testosterone during development and skull robustness. Tamer individuals more successfully passed on their genes, and so these traits prevailed in the human lineage. Over time, our species became domesticated. ...

Researchers now know that breeding animals solely for tameness ultimately leads to full domestication. ...

A 2014 Genetics paper offered an explanation for how such disparate traits — from heads to adrenal glands to tails — could have the same underlying cause. ...

So it’s thought that humans self-domesticated because aggressive individuals were gradually eliminated from society. A happy tale of “survival of the friendliest.”

The idea here is that during Roman and Medieval times, Europe systematically executed murderers and other antisocials. This left White people genetically more prosocial.

China did something similar, but it eliminated noncomformists.

Northwestern Europe was unique in encouraging individuality and cooperation. According to this theory, many centuries of eugenics resulted in a White population with genes suitable for creating a great civilization.

I am not sure if this theory can ever be proved in a convincing way. They would have to find genes for individuality, cooperation, and other such traits, and show how they vary across world populations. And they would have to figure out how important these traits were for building a civilization.

It is also not clear what this would mean for the future. It would seem to make Whites instinctively want to trust others as being like themselves, while that may not be true.