Reldas of Melchezidec

Here is a proposed analogy for macroevolution and speciation. It may help some people to understand it better if they can visualize it:

Suppose you take something we've proven to work, such as artificial selection. You can breed for a specific trait in a...dog-for example, so that in one case you make a 200kg dogzilla, and another case you breed for smaller and smaller size across the generations, untill you have something more like a rat. When one is in heat, throw them in together and see what happens.
The most probable outcome will not be romantic in nature, as there is a real physical barrier to procreation, though they are both still dogs. However, though you could arrange for some tampering and somehow make a cross, the dogs will most likely not interbreed if let loose to thier own devices.
There is enough difference between them so that they will breed with thier own "kind". Without mixing genes occasionally, the dogs could potentially speciate from each other- like so: Just by a slight change in the structure or amount of sperm or the shape of either's sexual organs, it could physically separate the populations for good, so that even if they did manage to get past all the differing mateing behaviors and actually mate, there wouldn't be fertilization or perhaps the offsping would be sterile, like a mule.

Just replace the parts where humans meddle, with "nature", and you have speciation! It just usually takes alot longer in nature for populations to be separated. As long as there is cross-fertillization among populations then little differences will be shared with everyone,(unles "nature" doesn't like the difference) but if they're separated by mountains or something, they will start to differientiate from each other.


Is this a good way to visualize it, step by step? I have explained it this way to yec's and they seem to understand it, without triggering responces. Perhaps some variation of this?
One could make it much simpler by saying" you know how humans breed for specific traits in animals? Yes? Well, nature does that too."

Doubting Didymus

I generally like the dogs thing as an example, because it combines both an example of how speciation might work as well as some pretty startling morphological change. Unfortunately creationists often don't have two braincells to rub together, and come up with the following:

"They're all still dogs"

"Only intelligent selectors can do that"

"Thats just a rearrangement of old information, no new information has come into being"

"Dogs still don't give birth to potplants"

NZAmoeba

Exactly... If a St.Bernard and a Beagle can have a common ancestor, why does it seem so absurd that humans and chimps have a common ancestor too?

Has anyone ever heard a rebuttal against the dog-breed analogy?

Godless Wonder

Slightly off-topic perhaps, but does it strike anyone else that what people have done to dogs is a little, well, twisted?

I mean, look at a Chihuahua, or a Pekinese, or a Dachshund. They're all a damn long way from what I suppose a "prototypical" dog should look like. And anyway, what is a "natural" dog supposed to look like? I imagine it's like a wolf or a coyote, or, a bit like a husky, or a German shepherd.

I once asked a veterinarian about this, if he thought what people had done to dogs was a bit weird. The question seemed to fly right over his head, he just said, "Well, you've got your 'little dog problems' and you've got your 'big dog problems'" and seemed to get bogged down a little in the details. He may have been a dog breeder himself, so, perhaps a little blind to the question.

But I have always thought that dogs provided strong evidence that evolution, acting over long periods of time could produce substantial changes seeing as how humans have massively impacted the poor infreakinated dogs in a very short time.

Reldas of Melchezidec

Thanks to Thomas, the Amoeba, and the Wonder! One will reply to each in some detail:

Thomas, one has used the dog example as well as a few others, but apparently with different results. When one speaks to a person about natural process, it is from one brother to another- so that they may act out of faith, as opposed to acting from ignorance. That is difficult to do online... and one doesn't know that your motives would allow for such an approach.
To the first rebuttal, one would possibly reply with a story about say... foxes and how they are able to climb trees like a cat. Even though it is a canid, it split off a while back and without interbreeding with wolflike ancestors, the fox ancestors evolved to fill a niche. So what if they're still dogs, they've evolved separately and speciated.
Of course, this reply doesn't do any good untill the second rebuttal is adressed: One would usher the person in the way of genesis 1 for clues. One would ask them if they mean intelligent selectors like the ones in genesis 1, and if so, one would read it with them. At the point where Elohem is recorded as saying "let the waters teem with living things", or "let the land produce vegetation" One would confront the person saying "Right here in genesis, intelligent selectors create indirectly by causing the land do it. We can look today at the land and see how it creates variation in life, like it says in genesis. We call it evolution for short.
The third rebuttal is easy enough to silence: "Yes, isn't it a wonder that life can speciate with just rearrangeing or recombineing the DNA from it's parent(s)?!" or "Yes I suppose this is somewhat true, or just as true as the statement that no new software has come into being, just rearrangement of old ones and zeroes".
To the fourth rebuttal, one might say: "Probably the best evidence for macroevolution is microevolution and the fossil record. Microevolution is a phenomena that allows for small changes to occur in a population. The fossil record is a phenomena that shows simple creatures in an old strata, and more complex ones in the next. This means that small changes over time can look like big changes." or "yes, Its hard to visualize, but some of the best proof for macroevolution, is that life exists right now, and and many modern species are vary different from earlier life in the fossil record, though enough characteristics are shared between us that we know we are all related somehow. This is also the best proof for "creation", its just that most modern scientists don't personify it that way. Biologists call it "nature" because it doesn't seem like any "intelligence" they've seen, so let them use what they believe works. Nature seems to lack compassion as well as any other human characteristics, but we know that the bible says that 'for the owls of the desert and the jackals shall honor him'. This means that even though these creatures just eat each other and reproduce, they honor thier creator by doing so. Ergo, let the animals eat each other and get it on to honor thier creator, and let us animals with the image do all that, but also love one another and creation above ourselves, and let those of us who love creation enough to study it and figure out how it works develope our own system for doing so." The end.

One doubts that you would counter in this manner, but maybe a few of the afforementioned points will be helpfull in future encounters.


Now, for NZAmoeba:
One hasn't heard of a rebuttal against the dog analogy, except for the ones supplied by Thomas. Maybe someone else with more yec notches on thier intellectual sword can provide that.


Godless Wonder,
The dogs were molded by humans into a tool, just like we manipulate every other form of matter we can get our hands on.
One thinks pekinese were some sort of asian royal scrap disposal system. Dashunds are short but long bodied to anchor them as they fight badgers or foxes in thier burrows. One heard of a rumor that many lapdogs were taylored so that they would attract fleas to themselves rather than thier owner, to keep from getting the plague, but this sounds suspicious... but one knows that Chihuahuas can be used as bait for bigger things, in hard times.

Again, thanks all for your honest replies and assurance through lack of critisizm that one's dog analogy was a viable way of explaining(visualizeing) macroevolution. One hopes one's reply will spark more interest and discussion on the topic, as one is often ignored when trying to be helpfull.


peace and grace,
-sad

Duvenoy

Interesting. A dog-breeder friend has the skull of an English bulldog. It is the most mishappened chunk of ill-matched bone I've ever seen.

For another example, consider the Cheeta, a cat built like a greyhound. Even it's feet are dog-like, their claws non-retractable -- the cat could never reach the speeds it does on the sneak-and-pounce feet and limb stucture of all other felids.

I wonder why this animal is so seldom (ever?) used as an example.

doov

theyeti

Doubting Didymus, obviously a man who has endured much creationist arm-waving, gave perfect examples of the rebuttals you'll find. Of course they're terrible rebuttals, and can be shown to be flawed, but the counter-rebuttal takes time, and by then the creationist has gotten what he wants: The appearance of debate. In the culture of creationism, the important thing seems to be that they have a response for everything -- in order to keep up the appearance of a controversy -- and not that the responses are actually defensible.

For fun, I'll go through the list and address them:

This is the standard typological argument, and would only be legitimate if biologists believed that organisms could be pigeon-holed into certain "types" or "kinds" that were qualitatively different. Of course that's what creationists believe; biologists recognize taxonomic names to be human inventions that form a heirarchy of relationships, and that organisms in different categories differ only in degree. You could just as easily say, "they're all still mammals," or "they're all still vertebrates" and the argument would be the same. When an organism belongs to a taxonomic category, it will always and forever belongs to that category. You have to add more categories below it to represent future divergence. Even if a dog lineage becomes something very different than it is today, it will always be recognized as being a dog for taxonomic purposes. Though for everyday purposes, we could call it whatever we wanted to, like a snoobufu. And then creationists would say that snoobufu breeds were still snoobufus...

At any rate, this argument misses the point that there was significant morphological change. The canine example is not meant to provide evidence for all of evolutionary history by itself, but rather to show that mutation + selection is capable of affecting major morphological change (and within a short time in this case), which is what creationists claim is too wildly implausible. (Though oddly enough, they make an exception for the Flood.)

This gem is promoted by, among others, Philip Johnson. He claims that examples of artificial selection are really examples of "intelligent design". It's a silly claim, because artificial selection is used as an analogy to natural selection, and the question is how good of an analogy it is. It happens to be an extremely poor analogy to "intelligent design", which according to Johnson's brand at least, means some sort of direct intervention with or fiat creation of the organism. Of course that's not what breeders do. They don't "design" dog breeds in the sense that they sit down at a drafting table and draw up a design that they want to actualize. Instead they simply choose from variation that arises through random mutation; they do nothing to induce the variation that they must select from. They then select from the variation by seeing to it that the animals having the desired traits have more offspring. In this sense, it is completely analogous to natural selection; the only difference is in who's doing the selecting. There is no analogy to ID, except for the fact that an intelligent being is involved. But of course the actions of a dog breeder are not what the IDists are claiming they think happened. (For example, do they think that humans were made from chimps because God "bred" them, and that God had nothing to do with the source of variation?)

This is another classic Johnson argument. The claim rests largely on how one defines "information". It's not really possible to have any biologically relevant defintion of information and to have this claim still be true. By all accounts, the current morass of dog breeds represents more information than the ancestral population alone. The idea that a wild population of dogs/wolves contained all of the gene alleles that make every dog breed unique is laughable. Where was this information hiding? Was it all in recessive genes? Did a chiuaua or Irish wolf hound occasionally pop out? Why don't modern populations have such an incredible array of recessive alleles waiting in the wings? We know that without the presence of humans, most of this variation would go extinct, so how was it maintained in the past?

What makes the claim worse is that many modern dog breeds can do things that no wild dogs or wolves can do. For example, a bloodhound has a more powerful sense of smell than a wolf, a greyhound runs faster than a wolf, and a St. Bernard is stronger than a wolf. The Alaskan Malamute can withstand colder temperatures than a wolf, and the Rhodesian Ridgeback can withstand hotter temperatures. One would have to believe that the wolf population form which dogs descended had all of these amazing characteristics, which makes you wonder why modern wolves don't have them. It also makes you wonder how the ancestral super-dog population managed to maintain contadictory characters (like huge size and tiny size) simultaneously.

This is similar to the "they're still dogs" argument, but stupider.

Of course the theory of evolution makes it clear that dogs should not give birth to pot plants. This would be an example of extreme saltationism, which is not compatible with modern evolutionary theory.

So, there it is. See, it takes some explaining to point out why these snappy one-liners are fatally flawed. But creationists will happily stick to the one-liners because they're effective.

theyeti

Doubting Didymus

Bloody good work, my large hairy nonexistant comrade.

RufusAtticus

"Thats just a rearrangement of old information, no new information has come into being"

A refutation that I have use in the past for this is Scottish Folds. Their unique characteristic is a perculiar ear shape that is a dominant mutation. That is how we know that it is occured [i]de novo[/b] in the 1961, in a dam named Susie since it was not spotted before then. Through selection breeders developed an entire breed of cats with this trait.