Consider these evolved neoteny crumbs.

Are we there yet?

Cultural evolution diversifies the physical environments where humans live, creating a multitude of places where useful mutations can thrive. And greatly increased population density means ever more bodies where mutations may be selected for usefulness.

The result, says Greg Cochran, one of the authors, is that human biological evolution has accelerated, to perhaps 100 times as fast as in prehistory. . .

Accelerated biological evolution in humans doesn’t mean that we’re turning into aliens, but there is evidence that hundreds of human genes are under selection pressure, having to do with such things as diet, vitamin metabolism, the functioning of the central nervous system, disease resistance, hair, skin and eye color, the shape of the skeleton and behavioral traits better suited to living in large groups. “We’re tamer,” Cochran said.

I asked him why we’re not developing floppy ears like the silver foxes bred for tameness.

Floppy member syndrome does seem to be increasing, but we have pharmaceuticals for that problem too. And, we are smarter, or something.

If IQ really correlates with the ability to flourish in an industrial society (and I'm quite prepared to believe that), then it is, as I said last time, a measurement of the ability to navigate paper-pushing bureaucracies — to learn to manipulate arbitrary abstract explicit rules, and to do so on command. Presuming that people who don't manage to pull off at least some minimum level of this make very unattractive mating partners, and so have below-average reproductive success, then those of us in developed countries have spent the last one or two centuries breeding for docility, in both senses of the word.

Is and ought seem to be colluding.

You made it pretty clear in a press conference what you think is posing the biggest threat to human kind. What is that?

The y-chromosome. Some boys are more aggressive. We associate war and violence with that. I believe we need to teach our boys not to solve their problems by fighting.

All of this was predicted long ago.

Such despotism would, Tocqueville writes,

resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves… . It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? … [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; … it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Tame, docile, effeminate, timid and industrious. What's not to like?