Dogs will be Dogs will be ???

Your observation may be partially correct. As you know, most of the time in these types of forums, people with my perpectives are under attack. There are more of you than me. I only have so much time, so I try to target my replies. I will try and address yours if you will be patient with me. Sorry.

This has been brought up a number of times in various threads. The term "kind" is less defined than any definition of species. Are all whales one kind, or are toothed whales a different kind? Are dogs, wolfs & coyotes the same kind or are they different kinds?

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969

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For instance with dogs, you don't see one dog being born with two toes or one toe/hoove and it being beneficial. If we did, then I might agree with you. If we have seen any evidence of beneficial mutations in horses that have been or potentially are being naturally selected then I think you would have an argument.

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Actually you do. My example does not include horses or dogs though. I have had several cats that are born with six toes. Were these six toes beneficial to the cat species and there by increasing their diversity throughout the population? Probably not, but that doesn't matter. The fact is, they did breed regardless of wether or not their mutation was beneficial, and quess what? six toed kittens. Not all but some from the liter. Who then will go on to spread the mutation to other cats down the line.

Thanks for attempting to answer my question: Analysis: And that limit doesn't apply when there are mutations. A mutation can change the status quo. Not so. Going back into the fossil record you can see that with sufficient micros the changes go up to that "boundary" and charge charge right on past it. That is all the little the micros adding up to a macro. But with enough time and selection pressure you could breed something other than a cow. Not so. Mutations can produce new capacities! Remember the recent E. coli study where the little critters, through several micros, evolved the ability to eat another food in their environment? That was a new capacity! It was not present in the original population. It took either two or three separate mutations (micros) but added up to a new beneficial mutation. And because that species was defined on the basis of its diet, it formed a new species in doing so. "Genetic capacity" was increased, not decreased. Not so. We do see "genetic capacity" change or even increase. Your ideas of "degradation and stasis" are probably influenced by the concept of "the fall" but have no reality in biology and genetics. Another example: the mutation(s) that allowed for lighter colored skin among early Europeans. That allowed people to move farther north, as with lighter skin the body produced more vitamin D from the weaker northern sunlight. That is an example of a new trait, an increased capacity, and something that was not there originally.But you have been sidetracked from the original question. What is the mechanism that prevents those micros from adding up to a macro?You presented several tentative answers, but they neither addressed the main question nor were they correct.Your primary claim was that there is a "genetic capacity" which limits differentiation, but evidence shows that this is not the case.I consider that you have not suitably answered the question of a mechanism preventing macroevolution.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Every case? Baloney.A sizeable fraction of West Africans in Burkina Faso have a mutation in the gene that makes hemoglobin. It changes the same amino acid that the sickle-cell anemia mutation does, but the change is to a third, different form of hemoglobin called hemoglobin C. Kids that are homozygous for this variant get clinical malaria 7% as much as their classmates with boring old "normal" hemoglobin A. Most people with hemoglobin C never know it because they never have ill effects from it. But they survive malaria....The mutation "exists in the population," alright. But all indications are that it's only existed there for a thousand years or so. The frequency of the gene in (non-removed by migration and slave-trade) populations maps to make a bull's-eye centered in the homeland of the Mossi people. It's beneficial in a malarious environment like that one. It's documented. You are mistaken.

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

And mutation. If you don't know this, then you have some reading to do. Which we see over and over again.This is like saying "if gravity was true, then we'd see things fall when we drop them".We do. Yeah, we have a bunch of intermediate forms.We win. You are still lying to us about what we think.You are not going to deceive us by so doing. I prefer it when you give references that we can read.Since you do not, I am not going to take your word for what any scientific paper says without reading it myself. Because experience shows us that you are not very reliable as to facts.---Damnit, I had hopes for you. But you're just a creationist lie-machine after all.LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT GENETICS. Anything, it's all good.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

First off your cat didn't develop a new feature like a hoove. It had a mutation that effected an existing feature...the toe.Secondly, you need to kill the cats and bury them. Then in another million years someone will uncover them and declare a new cat species.Thirdly, why are you calling this six toed creature a cat? It certainly is a unique species and transitional creature isn't it?
Oh wait, it can still interbreed with five toed cats. You see this is simple. But with a fossil, we have no record of its genetic ability to reproduce. All we have is the fossils. We really don't know it's ancestry. The rest is imagination and assumption.

Unlike the intermediate forms demonstrating the evolution of horses in the fossil record, then. Pre-dic-tion.

Of course they are not. Convergent evolution and mimicry are very old news.If you agree with the study you're referring to, you're certainly accepting a much greater degree of evolution than most creationists.So, flamingos and grebes are the same kind, eh? With that level of evolution accepted, we not only have common ancestry with the apes, but also with old world monkeys.You've put us firmly in the primate kind. Well done.

And this, of course, is why creationists will never present us with a biological, morphological, or genetic criterion for "created kind".They want to lump together as many species as they can into each "created kind", while spliting humans and chimpazees into two different "created kinds".Obviously there is no criterion that enables them to do that. They have to leave this term undefined, just as they have to evade the question about the imaginary line between microevolution and macroevolution, or the imaginary line between varieties and species.Of course they can't say what they mean, their world would fall apart if they tried.

Hi AlphaOmegaKid,The hoof is an evolution of the third toe (I found out on Wikipedia, I'm no horse evolution expert) - so it's a modification of an existing feature.If a pair of cats were killed and buried, the chances of them being fossilised and found in a million years is probably 0.00000000001%. Or less. But to answer your question, finding a single six toed cat- like creature would I suspect be treated as an anomaly /mutant rather than a new species, because mammals generally have 5 digits.To be honest it doesn't matter that much which creatures in the fossil record could have interbred or not. If evolution is true then breeding across 'species boundaries' must have happened millions of times.You're right we can't actually prove that one creature descended from another if we find their fossilized remains. But as far as I'm concerned finding a sequence of fossils that tell a story, in dated rocks, is pretty good evidence. I'm sure you disagree with that but it convinces me.

We have complete skeletons of intermediate equiids, and they can show (1) similarity between species / intermediate forms on the same order as we have for dogs and wolf (2) specific elements of teeth, jaw and hoof can show a "family" similarity between species that also mark them as different from dog, wolf, and from other life forms existing in the same area and time.If we were going to do a really complete analysis we would want to measure bone for bone on the skeletons, to see changes in absolute size and in proportions to be able to generate the kind of grid that was done for house cat and red fox I am not aware of any genetic data on hyracotherium or mesohippus. This is one of the problems with trying to apply the genetic definition of evolution to fossils, so we have to use the information that is available. What the variation between dogs and wolves show is a range of variation possible for any species, thus we can look at all the fossils in an area and time and sort them into groups based on whether the variation between {A} and {B} is greater or lesser than the variation between dogs and wolves (or as mentioned to Beretta, from wolf to dog₁ or dog₂ rather than ∑[dogs]), and what this shows is probable relationships at the scale above species, the scale where "macroevolution" occurs and where creationists point to "large scale change". And that is the essence of the argument: the range of variation around hyracotherium provided by dogs includes Mesohippus, with Orohippus in between to form a bridge that shows closer lineage from eohippus to mesohippus than to other forms of life from that time and area.Without genetic data, this is the kind of evidence we have.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
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Hi AlphaOmegakid, thanks for your interest in this thread, however I have one small problem. It seems you are taking "potshots" at details and not addressing the issue.These "potshots" then lead to off-topic replies from other posters. This is the kind of comment I mean: rather than address the issue of evolution of dogs and horses you want to talk about something else, something that is off topic.In response to this, it seems that you are guilty of the category error, for, as I am the person that defined this thread I get to define the category - not you. Please read Message 1 and adjust your response to the topic's intentionally narrow scope - the original thesis is a response to the question by Beretta:

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"The fossil record shows variations of all sorts of things but will time turn a dog kind into something that we would say is clearly not a dog?"

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The question that we need to deal with first then is what is "clearly not a dog?" Please feel free to start a thread on that, rather than clog this thread up with more off topic issues. You are quibbling about classification of species in genus categories and not about bacteria to man ... or put another way, you are not addressing the issue but taking potshots at details. Horses, however, evolved hooves from dog-like paws, and that happens to be part of this thread's topic: care to address the topic?From Message 154
Agreed. Thus this amount of variation between two similar fossils species is entirely possible under "micro"evolution, and we can connect fossil to fossil to fossil by this amount of variation as time passes. That's not the question at all. The question is whether the amount of variation known in dogs is sufficient to demonstrate that the evolution of the modern horse from eohippus is just a matter of the same variation within dogs as we proceed through the fossils in time. So? We have two kinds of "speciation" in the fossil record, one is arbitrary - where enough variations have accumulated that the latest fossil does not resemble the first in the series, and we call it a new species for the sake of identification. This allows us to talk about hyracotherium and mesohippus and not have to talk about the significant differences between them to clarify what we are talking about. This is all that all taxon classifications are - convenient labels to distinguish what we are talking about.The other kind of "speciation" in the fossil record is non-arbitrary - where a single population divides into two or more distinct daughter populations that are different enough that this shows they did not share hereditary information. For instance you can take any two isolated dog breeds and form hybrids, and the hybrids will show a mix of traits that bridge the morphology of one to the other, but as long as you keep them reproductively isolated they will continue to have divergent morphologies. No, the question -- the issue of this thread -- is not the variation we have in dogs or in horses today, but how we got from something like a dog less than 55 million years ago to something like modern day horses: by "micro"evolution in stages from one "species" to the next with variation that does not exceed the variation seen in dogs, or is there some other mechanism involved. Message 156
Message 163
And this is a problem how? The issue is not about how big eohippus was, but whether we can show evolution by stages of variation similar to dogs from eohippus to modern horse. Does the size change what the fossil is? Let's stop doing the pot-shots on details and deal with the issue eh? Since you started on this thread we have essentially gone from 150 posts to 200 posts without addressing the topic, and while you are not the only one to make off-topic posts, yours are the root cause of the others.The issue is whether we can step from equid fossil to equid fossil while staying within the amount of variation seen in dogs and by the use of these "stepping stones" of possible variation get from eohippus to modern horse.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : .

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

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• • • Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click) • • •

I've not been following this thread and apologize if I'm running over old ground, but what would "clearly not a dog" look like. Wolves are clearly not dogs, and have more resemblance to either Great Danes or Pekinese then either have to each other. IOW, if we weren't so familiar with "dogs" would not these things be considered separate species now? Are we failing to recognize first stage macro-evolution?

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KindlyEveryone deserves a neatly dug grave. It is the timing that's in dispute.‘—

To succinctly address what you declare is your central issue the answer in NO. We do not see dog evolution changing from "toes" to hooves. We do not see dog evolution change the number of rib bones multiple times. We do not see dog evolution changing the numer of vertebrae multiple times. We do see size changes. We see all kinds of colors and textures of hair. And we see substantial changes in skull shapes. What we see in dog evolution is variation in gene alleles. We do not see specialized features from new genes. We see no more morphological variation in dogs than we do in humans. We have giants and dwarfs. We have all colors of skin and all kinds of variation in hair. We see people with differnt number of toes and fingers, But we don't see people with hooves. And if we did, we wouldn't see them be positively selected by nature. We do see many negative mutations but we don't see any beneficial mutations that are morphological.In fact I challenge you to cite a human, dog, or horse mutation that has been identified as "beneficial" and is morphological. Note the term morphological. This is what can be seen in the fossil record.That is the type of evidence you need to convince me that this type of evolution is possible. Without this evidence you just have your imagination.Now I hope you agree this addresses your main thesis..