GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

CHAPTER 9
ZEBRAS, UNHAPPY
MARRIAGES, AND THE
ANNA KARENINA
PRINCIPLE
DOMESTICABLE ANIMALS ARE ALL ALIKE; EVERY UNDO¬
mesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.
If you think you've already read something like that before, you're
right. Just make a few changes, and you have the famous first sentence of
Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." By that sentence, Tolstoy
meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different
respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline,
religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential
respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients
needed for happiness.
This principle can be extended to understanding much else about life
besides marriage. We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success.
For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding
many separate possible causes of failure. The Anna Karenina principle
explains a feature of animal domestication that had heavy consequences
for human history—namely, that so many seemingly suitable big wild
mammal species, such as zebras and peccaries, have never been domesticated
and that the successful domesticates were almost exclusively Eurasian.
Having in the preceding two chapters discussed why so many wild