Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
Interpretation
The quote highlights humanity's historical achievement in domesticating large mammals and suggests that we have reached a limit in expanding our domestic animal species.
Jared Diamond's quote reflects on the extensive domestication of large wild mammals throughout human history, indicating that almost all species suitable for domestication have already been tamed. It emphasizes the culmination of this process, suggesting that modern scientific efforts have not produced significant new domestic animals recently, thus pointing to a limitation in our ability to enhance our interactions with nature.
In practice
In a lecture on animal domestication, one might use this quote to illustrate the culmination of human efforts over millennia.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean β once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
What we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return
Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect. I kind of want to know what happened there because we're twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it. Mars once had running water. It's bone dry today. Something bad happened there as well.
If we just stay at the crest of the mycelial wave, it will take us into heretofore unknown territories that will be just magnificent in their implications.
It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.
When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.
Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an "elegant" or "robust" theory. But it isn't science.
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