Scholars use versions of this story to question sharp divisions of nature and culture in order to shape a more generative discourse for technoculture. Darcy Morey, a canine paleobiologist and archaeologist, believes that the distinction between artificial and natural selection is empty because all the way down the story is about differential reproduction. Morey de-emphasizes intentions and foregrounds behavioral ecology. Ed Russell, an environmental historian, historian of technology, and science studies scholar, argues that the evolution of dog breeds is a chapter in the history of biotechnology. He emphasizes human agencies and regards organisms as engineered technologies, but in a way that has the dogs active, as well as in a way to foreground the ongoing co-evolution of human cultures and dogs. The science writer Stephen Budiansky insists that domestication in general, including the domestication of dogs, is a successful evolutionary strategy benefiting humans and their associated species alike. Examples can be multiplied.
These accounts taken together require re-evaluating the meanings of domestication and co-evolution. Domestication is an emergent process of co-habiting, involving agencies of many sorts and stories that do not lend themselves to yet one more version of the Fall or to an assured outcome for anybody. Co-habiting does not mean fuzzy and touchy-feely. Companion species are not companionate mates ready for early twentieth-century Greenwich Village anarchist discussions. Relationship is multiform, at stake, unfinished, consequential.
Co-evolution has to be defined more broadly than biologists habitually do. Certainly, the mutual adaptation of visible morphologies like flower sexual structures and the organs of their pollinating insects is co-evolution. But it is a mistake to see the alterations of dogs’ bodies and minds as biological and the changes in human bodies and lives, for example in the emergence of herding or agricultural societies, as cultural, and so not about co-evolution.
— Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003)
She was really at the forefront of dog research. I didn’t realise how early the theory of co-evolution started. This has barely reached mainstream still now 23 years later.
