A number of years ago an Austrian scientist named Konrad Lorenz joined the Nazi Party. He later denied it, but unfortunately there was paperwork that refuted his claim. Lorenz wrote several pro-Nazi essays promoting eugenics and both decrying and later praising the "self-domestication" of man. His association with National Socialism lead to strains with his former student, Niko Tinbergen, who spent the war in a prison camp in Holland, and much criticism of the Nobel Committee when it awarded the Nobel Prize to Lorenz, Tinbergen and another Austrian ethologist, Karl Von Frisch (the latter had not collaborated with the Nazis.)
I took two courses in animal behavior under two well-known professors at the University of Arizona and the University of Florida and was also involved somewhat (less so than I wanted to be - too many taxonomic problems in the spiders and these had to be cleared up first) in the study of the ethology of spiders. Lorenz was one of the founders of the science. Still we were amused by Lorenz's "flush toilet" theory of animal behavior and the idea (since falsified) that dogs came from two different species- wolves and jackals (it is been demonstrated from DNA studies that dogs are descended from Asiatic wolves.) At the time I was unfamiliar with Lorenz's Nazi ties.
The idea that humans had degenerated from the apparently ideal Konan the barbarian type into a more domesticated and sissified weakling fit well into National Socialism and their totally unsuccessful eugenics program. Breeding humans to perfection turned out to be much more difficult than it seemed. For one thing human genes are not at all simple and many have several functions, while large numbers of genes apparently do not function at all, or at least so it would seem. Since the Nazi's had no knowledge of the true nature of the gene, it was easy to utilize pseudoscience and to envision a day when human perfection, in the form of a blond, blue-eyed beast, would take its place as the pinnacle of evolution, having destroyed all the inferior "races" and individuals. Picking an ideal from the millions of genes is, of course, fool's work, and was then, even though DNA would not be properly described until the 50s.
What is "self-domestication" anyway? It is an idea that shows up periodically, especially in regard to the idea that civilization has devitalized humans, especially the human male, whose natural bent is to violence and taking what he wants without concern for others. It is, in essence, a branch of Social Darwinism, of the sort that Darwin himself hated.
I will be honest here - I am a fan of civilization, while noting its flaws, which are many. However I do not want to go back to an age where we lacked modern medicine (which also has its problems) and in which the average person was illiterate and could barely count. The destruction of a civilized society based on equality in opportunity and just treatment under the law would be, and very well may be, a great crime. Whatever is said about the founders, they at least gave lip service to the common good. This puts me in the position of deploring the platform of the very political party with which I once affiliated. I will not say that they are in any way associated with Hitler or his eugenic program, but they are nationalistic in a state's rights sort of way, often war-mongers (one branch is. however, paradoxically isolationist), often racist, anti-woman, and social Darwinians even as they condemn Darwin and it often seems any form of science. Apparently the lure of the "natural man" transcends ages and the veneer of civilization. If man is domesticated, he (and she) very easily slips the bonds of such conditioning. I am not sure where to begin here as the historical data are overwhelming, but the French Revolution, the gun fight at the O.K. Corral, My Lai, and the Battle of Spotsylvania come to mind.
The trick, it seems to me, is to develop a sustainable civilization. With our dependance on fossil fuels, huge amounts of metal and wood, and tendencies toward overpopulating the planet, we are finding such a society difficult to attain. It may simply be that we, with all our highly celebrated intelligence, are not intelligent enough to develop a sustainable civilization. That does not mean that there ever was some golden age where man lived in total harmony with nature in a sort of libertarian paradise. Humans have had a fairly successful run, with our main adaptation being that we are very adaptable (An idea that Konrad Lorenz actually endorsed in later life.) In addition, there has always been a almost primal drive toward community in humans, despite all the self-made man or woman propaganda, or belief in a "natural man." Obama was right when he said of such infrastructure as the interstate highway system that "You did not make that." Indeed it takes a village (to quote Hillary Clinton) to accomplish much of anything - hermits and castaways seldom invent much.
In truth self-domestication is, in my opinion, a myth and the "natural man" never existed any more than a golden age did. Even tribal societies cooperate and had some sort of code of conduct. We are the products of both our genes and our environment, including our social structure, interacting in such interconnected ways as to make it impossible to separate them. Thus human breeding experiments, such as those practiced by the Nazis are doomed to failure. They certainly will not result in a "natural" or "perfect" human, whatever one means by natural or perfect.
Brüne M. 2007. On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics. Philos Ethics Humanit Med. 2007; 2: 21.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
Johnson, G. Evolution of the family dog. http://www.txtwriter.com/...