Domestication and the behavior-genetic analysis of captive populations

Captive environments are believed to produce behavioral changes in animal populations that may limit our ability to generalize back to natural populations. These behavioral changes are thought to be associated with one or both of the following: (a) changes in frequencies of genes or gene complexes due to the effects of inbreeding or to changes in selection pressure; (b) changes in development of the phenotype due to the effects of changes in environmental variables. Inbreeding leads to increase in homozygosity, that may result in developmental anomalies because of a breakdown in developmental homeostasis. Changes in selection pressure may disrupt coadapted gene complexes that have evolved in the wild. Often, domestication is believed to result in individuals that are “degenerate”; i.e. inferior to individuals in the wild. However, this notion has received no empirical support. In fact, if phenotype changes do occur under domestication, these are usually quantitative, not qualitative, in nature. We suggest that the study of the domestication process may reveal evolutionary principles that would be difficult to discover in other ways, and the zoological parks may be ideal situations for such research.