WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

Richard Francis, in his refreshingly comprehensive new book Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World, gives pride of place in his overview of humanity's steady adaptive impression on the animal kingdom to dogs, devoting his first chapters to the slow, still-murky process by which early man shaped wolves into tamed canines, proto-dogs that helped their human benefactors in ways that persist today [...]

Francis portrays it as a keystone alliance, and he stresses the initial unlikely nature of the thing itself:

What makes this amazing evolutionary story even more remarkable is that for many thousands of years, all wolf-human interactions were overtly hostile. We competed fiercely for the same prey and probably killed each other at every opportunity. In this respect dogs are unique among domesticated animals. Their evolution by domestication represents, in many ways, a reversal of eons of prior evolution by natural selection.

That innovative process - the steady, intentional reversal of the forces of natural selection, or rather, humanity's subsuming of the role of natural selection, shaping and directing the lives of client animals straight into the "anthropocene," the modern era in which human overpopulation and human technology have re-shaped the entire world. In that anthropocene, the handful of species domesticated by humans may win the Pyrrhic victory of outliving their wild brethren at the cost of their own freedom.

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