An evolution question I've often wondered about.

[Slimebeast]

highwaystar101 said:

Slimebeast said:

highwaystar101 said:
What I find interesting is that the evolution of the dog has happened within 13,000 years. This is because of the human domestication of the dog. Different environments cause different evolution and the early ancestor of all the dogs (Canis Canis I believe) were domesticated and used for hundreds of different purposes.

Humans only used the dogs that were best suited for the job they had domesticated them for, the others didn't survive, this is evolution that is extremely rapid. Dogs that were used for protection became increasingly vicious, dogs that were used to plough fields became big and strong and so on. All this change has happened over just a few millenniums.

So to answer your question stof, yes these dogs are the same species and can mate with each other. However, they will continue to drift apart and in a few more thousand years you might find that they will actually become different species all together, and the difference between species becomes ever more vast.

And despite this extreme selective pressure by the environtment (in this case mediated by humans) over the course of thousands of years dogs are still dogs.

So dogs are a great example of the creationist claim that micro evolution occurs but not macro evolution.

But the fact is they wont be just dogs forever Slimebeast, look into the future. They evolve at an accelerated rate, but this is only over a 13,000 year period, even accelerated evolution would be hard pressed to create several separate species of mammal from one in that time period. It has created many subspecies though.

What I'm saying is that micro and macro are simply an illusion. Dogs have taken 13,000 years to get this far, but they have changed a lot. In 13,000 years do you see dogs being the same as they are today? No of course not, they will evolve further. How about 13,000 years after that, and another 13,000 years after that and so on? They will just continue to grow more and more diverse.

In an extremely simplified manner micro evolution is just small stages that add up to a macro evolution.

Do you believe that a hundred cycles of these 13,000 year periods of increasing genetic difference, what you will have left is essentially still a dog? 

My example does not prove that micro evolution is the only way things evolve at all imho.

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Evolutionists have already proved micro evolution to just about everyone because the evidence is overwhelming. Evidence for macro evolution, despite being a lot harder to find and test for than micro, is building up quite nicely.

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I think I've said it once before, but I'll say it again (and I really hope I don't offend you). You are different to a lot of debaters Slimebeast, I can tell you have read about evolution, I know you read links given to you, you digest the information and you are a very intelligent person so you understand it. I always get this feeling that you accept evolution as a valid scientific theory in the back of your mind, I can just tell when I talk about it to you. You're *different* to a lot of people who argue creationism.

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That said, I don't know why creationists refuse to accept evolution so forcefully, macro included. If a creator created Earth billions of years ago, then why can't the original animals macro evolve? If the animals macro evolve into something else over millions, or even billions, of years then does that mean that they weren't created in the first place? no, of course not, it doesn't suggest that.

First, I'm not easily offended and second, you are always very polite man. And you have your analysis right about me roughly speaking.

What I would like to know about dogs in those 13,000 years is how much they have changed genetically. Each mammal has rufly 50,000 genes and each gene code for a protein. Now, typically just the existing variants of each gene accounts for the differences we see between individuals, like length, hair color, eye color etc. But in dogs I can imagine that also small new mutations in some genes determine some specific and unique characterics for some breeds, for example the chinese naked dog having almost no fur, mutations that were not present in the original dog/domesticated wolf gene pool 13,000 years ago.

What I wonder though, and this should be able to be analysed on a statistical level actually, is if there's completely new genes underway in some dog breeds? I mean there should be at least a few completely new genes, because those 13,000 years with extremely varied environmental and selection pressure on the gene pool (and many of them being isolated from each other) are magnitudes more powerful than it ever is in nature, and should translate to 100's of thousands of years or even millions of years of 'natural' evolution (if we compare to the 'normal' evolution rate typically, according to neo-Darwinism).