Wild Things

So here's an interesting thing: it only takes a generation for domestic pigs to devolve into wild beasts. That's right, let Wilbur off the farm and he's going to sprout tusks and an aggressive attitude in no time at all.

As a result, some people wonder whether pigs are really domesticated. News flash: those hideous creatures are big, stinky cannibals. And, as Steinbeck so eloquently described, they will eat small humans as well. Any questions?

What about us? How many generations would it take us humans to devolve?

If we were separated from our domestic bliss, sent out into the wild by the vagaries of flood or drought or ice age, I doubt we'd sprout tusks or ape-arms (although the way men sprout whiskers between dawn and dusk, I kind of wonder what else might be in the DNA). But what part of our civility and civilization might we leave behind?

We humans are notorious forgetters. We needed the whole Renaissance to remember things that we apparently knew during the rise of the Greek Nation State. What would our world be like if we forgot modern medicine? Or agriculture? Or art?

What would we be like--as individuals and as a collective? Will future anthropologists and historians look back on as and see barbarian apes or wild pigs? Or will they have cause to see us as humanitarian?

And do we have any say in the matter?

I think we do...how about you?