By Carl Zimmer, New York Times/Science, May 16/17, 2013

An article that summarizes the recent work of Ya-Ping Zhang, a geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who has led an international network of scientists who have compared pieces of DNA from different canines which is pointing to the theory that dogs domesticated themselves.

But the article's message is not just what it first appears to be. When you get to the concluding paragraphs there are some real though provokers:

[....] SLC6A4 may have played a crucial part in this change, because serotonin influences aggression.

To test these ideas, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues are gathering DNA from more dogs and wolves. They also hope to collaborate with cognitive scientists to see how variants of genes like SLC6A4 affect the behavior of dogs today. Their results may also help explain human evolution, because Dr. Zhang and his colleagues found that some of the same genes that evolved in dog brains, such as SLC6A4, also experienced natural selection in human brains.

“Humans have had to tame themselves,” said Adam Boyko of Cornell University, one of Dr. Zhang’s collaborators on the Molecular Biology and Evolution study. “The process is probably similar to dogs — you have to tolerate the presence of others.”

This also suggests humans might be able to make more progress in "taming themselves," and much more quickly than standard evolutionary change, through tinkering with not just genetics but also with brain chemistry.