November 17, 2025

A Fresh Look at Domestication

31 minutes

Robert Spengler IIISettled agriculture produced the food surpluses that enabled the development of civilisations. No wonder, then, that scholars have been keen to understand the origins of agriculture, as a way of starting to understand the origin of civilisations. The general view is that humans actively domesticated plants and animals, selecting the traits that made them more reliable producers of food. What if that’s all wrong? What if the traits that mark domestication are not the result of selection but instead an inevitable evolutionary response to changes in the environment? Changes wrought by humans, to be sure, but unconsciously and without any forethought.

That’s the central thesis of a new book, Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity, by Robert Spengler III.

Notes

Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity is published by University of California Press.

If you want more details but less than a book, Seeking consensus on the domestication concept by Spengler and colleagues is part of a journal issue devoted to domestication. There’s also the Spengler Lab website.

Here’s the transcript.

Image of a Neolithic sickle from the Museum Quintana

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