Gwern wrote an essay masquerading as a book review suggesting that we should finish domesticating cats recently. https://www.gwern.net/Book-reviews#review-of-l

Gwern wrote an essay masquerading as a book review suggesting that we should finish domesticating cats recently. https://www.gwern.net/Book-reviews#review-of-like-engendring-like-russell-1986 https://www.gwern.net/Book-reviews#review-of-like-engendring... The fact that you can make a serious case that cats are barely domesticated suggests there’s just not that much time or energy devoted to it. Domestication is the work of a career at best. If you wanted to domesticate macaques and you worked for 30 years you’d have ten generations to work with. The bigger the population the better because you have greater variation in the founding population. There’s just not a lot of demand there so there’s no money. Where there is demand breeding is very healthy, as in agricultural genetics generally, whether for increasing milk yield in cattle or in creating new types fruit trees as in apple varieties.