Dog Breeds as Evidence of Evolution?

Evidence of evolution? Image courtesy of Mikael Gustafsson, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Scientific American is a monthly popular science magazine that has often been a flagship for Darwinian evolution. During Charles Darwin’s anniversary the magazine has remembered to remind its readers that there are good evidences of evolution – such as dog breeds.

In the June issue, columnist Steve Mirsky confuses creationists with advocates of intelligent design. Enumerating the evidences for evolution, he mentions fossils, intermediate forms, comparative anatomy, genomic homologies and - dog breeds.

Mirsky does not write about fossils, not even about assumed intermediate forms, which might be wise, given the recent scandal featuring the Ida fossil. Instead, he discusses dog breeds in an attempt to show that Dr. Jonathan Wells of Discovery Institute erred in saying that there is no evidence for repeated speciation without which Darwinian evolution would be impossible.

Speciation as such is not a problem in the creation model since it takes into account an animal's in-built capacity for change and adaptability. Moreover, the term created kind (baramin) in Genesis differs considerably from the modern biological concept of species.

According to Mirsky, a 180-pound (80 kg) English Mastiff differs so much from a two-pound (1 kg) Chihuahua that they should be regarded as two distinct species although they both belong to the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris. But if they were to be declared separate species, the kind of speciation required by Darwinian evolution would have occurred.

Actually, it wouldn't.

Evolutionists have often a priori given a new species name to a fossil although the animal might have belonged to an already known species. Thus, there are far more dinosaur species on paper than there ever were in real life.

Dog breeds are evidence of the great adaptability of the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris. Contrary to what evolutionists like Mirsky insist, artificial selection that produces new dog breeds does not have anything to do with evolution. It always involves a loss of genetic information. While we could breed a Chihuahua from a wolf we could not breed a wolf from a Chihuahua.

It no longer has the required genetic information.

Source:

Mirsky, Steve. 2009. Are Dog Breeds Actually Different Species? Scientific American. (June 2009)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=an-immodest-proposal.
In the magazine's paper version the column had the title An Immodest Proposal