All apologies for beating this dead horse again, but I was wondering something.
Much of the debate on the truth of evolution branches off into its many subtopics. These debates get very wordy, very elaborate and bring up endless point and counterpoint on every little detail.
While I am definately not trying to discredit detailed debate, I was just wondering why this obfuscation and confusion occurs when the core of the topic really isn't that complicated or hard to understand at all.
Here's what I'm getting at: Why isn't something simple like Dog breeding enough to prove the existence of evolution?
For the sake of argument, just for a moment, forget about Darwin, forget about alleles, and completely forget human origins and monkeys.
If breeders wants a specific type of Dog, artificial selection is applied to many generations of a type of dog until the breeders(or more likely, their descendants) end up with an animal that has a silky, shiny coat, is rediculously miniaturized, or has a long slender frame for running quickly, etc.
Do you see what I mean?
You are right in thinking that changing something superficial like the length of an animals legs alone will not result in speciation. But there's no reason to believe it must stop there (unless you believe in some silly copout contruction like Macro/Micro evolution.)
More details here
So what do you guys think? Can't evolution be debated from simple points and facts? Does selective breeding not count as any sort of evolution or what?