Domestication as Field-Specified Developmental Arrest: A Unified Causal Mechanism for the Domestication Syndrome Derived from Attractor Geometry

The domestication syndrome — the convergent suite of morphological and behavioural traits appearing in every domesticated species including floppy ears, reduced pigmentation, shorter snout, smaller adrenal glands, and retained juvenile behaviour — has resisted unified causal explanation since its systematic description. Wilkins, Wrangham and Fitch (2014) correctly identified the cellular mechanism: mild reduction in neural crest cell migration. They did not identify the causal origin of that reduction. Here we propose and defend that origin: the domestication coherence gradient field (N_domestic) suppresses the maternal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, alters the intrauterine coherence gradient environment, and arrests neural crest cell migration at the juvenile-proximate developmental stage. Domestication is therefore not genetic modification of the organism. It is field-specified developmental arrest of the neural crest migration program. The domestic phenotype is the phenotypic signature of that arrest. Feralization is developmental resumption when the maintenance field is removed. This mechanism was derived from the attractor geometry framework (S + N + G → R) before literature consultation and is confirmed against five independent literature sources: Marcström & Essen-Möller (1968), Hemmer (1990), Wilkins et al. (2014), Belyaev (1979), and the feralization sequence literature. The mechanism predicts a specific asymmetry in domestication vs. feralization rates, a specific reversion sequence in feral animals, a specific cross-species universality of the syndrome, and a specific set of novel experimental outcomes (P7–P11) not predicted by the genetic model. The mechanism is structurally identical to EZH2-mediated attractor arrest in triple-negative breast cancer and nitrogen starvation-mediated arrest in the LECA protocol, suggesting a scale-invariant field-arrest mechanism operative from single cells to whole organisms. Pre-registered experimental predictions P7 (cross-fostering, Zenodo DOI: [P7 DOI]) and P9 (H3K27me3 ChIP-seq, Zenodo DOI: [P9 DOI]) are deposited as companion records and were locked before any experimental data was generated. Repository: github.com/Eric-Robert-Lawson/attractor-oncology