Think about that comment...
There’s no difference between humans culling out the ones less adapted to cold or the cold achieving it on its own...
“There’s no difference between humans culling out the ones less adapted to cold or the cold achieving it on its own...”
Sure there is. Is there a difference between someone punching you in the face and you accidently walking into a door? You might end up with a black eye either way, but the ramifications of the two different acts are enormous. Nature taking its course is one thing, but human beings deliberately manipulating the bloodline in animals to produce a better horse (one better suited to the extreme local environment) is an entirely different kettle of genetically altered fish. First of all, it implies that there was a very deliberate plan that was to be carried out not only over many generations of horse lives, but over some generations of human lives. That shows a level of planning and commitment that is nothing short of astounding in an illiterate, isolated group of people living what are essentially little better than stone age lives. Then there’s the realization that this means whoever did this understood exactly what it was doing, knew how to evaluate what was working and what was not, and so on. We do this today, but we understand genetics. They did this without any scientific understanding of genetics at all.