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Why would I say that, when my point was that his statement, "Zebras can be trained to be tame" says nothing about whether zebras can be domesticated?
? Esperanza makes an unsupported claim that "Zebras have been modified by being bred in captivity," and then goes on to conflate taming with domestication. His one concrete ostensible example, Lord Rothschild, is specifically mentioned by Diamond on page 171 of my edition, as an example of what domestication is not.
Because the response I suggested makes the same point without contradicting the definition of domesticability you cited, which is what your response did.
The part that says the ones we have larger and smaller captively bread zebras does not conflate the two, and fulfills the criteria from your definition. The lack of support is a valid argument, and maybe @Esperanza can elaborate and provide sources. But keep in mind under these criteria, the claim that the captive zebras are the same as the wild ones is also unsourced, despite the amount of ink spilled saying "no one domsesticated zebras".
He didn't cite is as an example of domesticability, it was a tangent.
? I really don't understand why you think that. I linked to a definitiin which says it is "the process of hereditary reorganization of wild animals and plants into domestic and cultivated forms according to the interests of people. In its strictest sense, it refers to the initial stage of human mastery of wild animals and plants. The fundamental distinction of domesticated animals and plants from their wild ancestors is that they are created by human labour to meet specific requirements or whims..." I elsewhere quoted this definition by Diamond: "domesticated animal is defined as an animal selectively bred in captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors, for use by humans who control the animal's breeding and food supply."
There is nothing contradictory about accepting that tameness is one of the "interests" or "specific requirements" or "modif[ications]" that humans might select for in a particular species.
Note that I referenced two articles re the guy mentioned who raises zebras in Utah or thereabouts, both of which referred to them as being the same as wild ones. Obviously reporters often get things wrong, but that is not "unsourced." In contrast, Esperanza seems to be making things up. I just looked at several zebra selling websites, and none make that claim. Note also that 1) there are larger and smaller species of zebra; and 2) Esperanza's claim isn't even about domestication, which involves changes at the species level, rather than merely repeatedly having your largest stallion and mare have sex, then selling the foals. If you are not cross breeding the foals over generations, you are not engaging in artificial selection.
Not how I read it.
Btw, Esperanza says "Obviously, their breeding is controlled by humans, " but perhaps not. This place says: "Most adult female zebras we sell are exposed to males and usually pregnant."
But you didn't say it was "one of" when responding to him, you made it's sound like it's only requirement.
By the way, I wanted to come back to my earlier point about "if it didn't happen, it's only because we didn't want it to". Do you still believe this is in any way an unreasonable statement, given that literally any feature we pick to change on whim will be enough to meet your criterion?
Sorry, there's been too much posted here for me to keep up, so I missed the articles you're talking about. Can you link them again? In any case it's not even about reporters getting it wrong, this has Menken's Bathtub written all over it, I doubt anyone checked if the zebras we've been keeping for the last 100-200 years exhibit any changes from the wild ones.
But it's a collective process. If you are having your largest stallion and mare have sex, than selling the foals, and everybody else who owns zebras is doing the same, and has been doing the same for generations, you are engaging in artificial selection.
Huh? That doesn't prove anything either way.
No, I didn't, because he brought it up. And it doesn’t matter what trait he mentioned, because my point was about the logic of his argument, not the specific content: he erroneously equated breeding with domestication.
It is a statement devoid of supporting evidence.
Perhaps, but the absence of evidence is hardly convincing evidence that it happened.
Yes, but it is incumbent upon you to show that that has happened.
It indicates that that organization, at least, is not controlling the breeding of their zebras.
Sure, but in the process of addressing his claim you also introduced an error into your argument.
What are you talking about, we have tonnes. We've gathered evidence for the mechanics of heritability since Gregor Mendel, and we know for a fact zebras operate by the same principles, because they don't randomly give birth to animals with wildly different features, nor do we see that they're perfect clones of each other. Given the available evidence, please tell me how what I said is supposed to be false?
It's a little bit weird that you and Diamond get to make wild and sweeping claims like "zebras have never been domesticated" without providing evidence, while everybody has to do the work Diamond was supposed to, when he made the claim.
How? All it says is that most females were/are pregnant.
If you think that, I fear that you don't understand the argument.
I think at this point you are losing sight of Diamond's argument. Your statement rests on an unstated premise, which is that all that is needed for domesticability is Mendelian inheritance, and that therefore all species are capable of being domesticated. Were that true, you would be correct. But Diamond's argument is that there is a suite of characteristics necessary for a species to be domesticable.
Well, Diamond does refer to several works on the history of domestication, as well as unsuccessful efforts by Europeans to domesticate zebras in particular. More importantly, your claim is that the entire book must be discounted because Diamond is wrong about zebra domestication. A rather strong claim, which therefore requires some sort of affirmative evidence. And one would think that by now you would have come up with such evidence. But I can say that one article, available through JSTOR says:
Greiner, Andreas. "Bio-Engineering across Empires: Mapping the Global Microhistory of Zebra Domestication in Colonial East Africa." Journal of World History 32.1 (2021): 127-159.
Yes, because they have been "exposed to males." Doesn't sound like they are talking about selective breeding, but they might be. But, again, all I said was "perhaps not" and this is just a sample of one. I am not claiming it is definitive proof.
Which indicates he's pulling a fast one with the definition of domesticability. If the definition you gave is the correct one, then it is the case that all you need is Mendelian inheritence.
So what exactly happened, did someone try breeding taller zebras, and failed even at that? You know that a claim like that makes no sense.
That wasn't my argument. You said GGS was not based on wrong factual premises, so I gave a few examples of just that off the top of my head, but my issue was the Theory of Everything stuff, which we discussed in the other comment chain.
Cool, but as you pointed out yourself, taming has nothing to do with domestication, and everything I read about why the domestication of zebras failed, including your quotes, talks exclusively about breeding for more tame behavior. So there's a bait and switch where demonstrations of zebras being trained are not enough to prove domesticability, because apparently it's only about breeding for features desired by humans, and then that argument is promptly forgotten when discussing how "zebras have never been domesticated".
Also:
What? For one, does cross-breeding even count as domestication? More importantly: that was a 6 year long experiment, you cannot seriously mean this is evidence that zebras are harder to domesticate than the ancient equivalent of the horse, and for that matter that the domestication attempt even failed. If the result was an animal different from the wild one, it already succeeded - or in the event the result isn't what was wanted at that time, it proves domestication didn't happen only because we didn't want it to (we just need to change what we want, and boom, we now know how to domesticate a zebra).
Yeah, which is why I said it doesn't prove anything either way.
You can buy zebra semen, and the seller suggests that the stallion has qualities that are worth passing on:
They also control who gets to be bred:
They claim the stallion is particularly tame and that his temperament is hereditary.
All the people involved in horses are amazingly focused on the lineage of horses. This passes to zebra breeding, and people really care about which animal breeds with which, as they all believe fervently in selecting for traits.
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