[fishtank]

Cute doggies in photo - ICR article image.

[trisham]

"Freedom is the sure possession of those alone
who have the courage to defend it."

~Pericles

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[fishtank]

Oh, by the way, it’s far better to contribute a thoughtful post rather than a “protest march slur”.

[DManA]

Says him.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Even chihuahua DNA is indistinguishable from wolf DNA, so I don’t think much evolution has occurred in the few thousand years that dogs have been domesticated.

[DManA]

Actually no. Current thinking is that wolves were attracted to human rubbish piles. The ones who were naturally less nervous around humans got the most stuff and survived better to mate with other wolves who were less nervous. This self selection repeated over a number of generations until you had an animal with dog like characteristics.

What happened naturally was replicated experimentally in foxes in Russia.

is believed that dogs were originally taken from the wild as wolves by early humans who selected and bred different varieties that were useful for companionship, hunting, and protection.

[Da Coyote]

Good grief, this guy is an embarassment.

[EveningStar]

[unlearner]

Dogs are born with their eyes closed. But the dogs in your picture are clearly conservative. They have their eyes open.

[blam]

[Sergio]

bkmk

[ZULU]

The Institute for Creative Research at work again.

What the study is saying is that the differences between wolf genome and dog genome with respect to digestive capabilities APPEARS not to be significant.

Using this result, the Institute for Creative Research takes the leap that ERGO, evolution of dogs from wolves did not occur.

This is like saying that since the digestive system of Race Horses and Arabian Horses appear to be basically identical, the one did nor develop from the other.

AMAZING.

I give them an “A” for faith and an “F” for thinking.

[Ha Ha Thats Very Logical]

It’s always useful with ICR articles to check the original sources when you can, because you can be sure the ICR writers will distort them. In this case, the original researchers concluded merely that dogs started to be domesticated pre-agriculture, so shared the same highly carnivorous diet as their hunter-gatherer companions: “In conjunction with the estimated timing of dog origins, these results provide additional support to archaeological finds, suggesting the earliest dogs arose alongside hunter-gathers rather than agriculturists.” They also suggest that there was a lot of admixture in the early days, so wolves and dogs wouldn’t be as different as they might have been otherwise.

In addition, they suggest that “the [amylase] copy number expansion was not fixed across all dogs early in the domestication process. In a survey of sequence data from 12 additional domestic dog breeds, we find that the Siberian Husky, a breed historically associated with nomadic hunter gatherers of the Arctic, has only three to four copies...whereas the Saluki, which was historically bred in the Fertile Crescent where agriculture originated, has 29 copies.” Which would seem to support the idea that evolving in conjunction with agriculture *would* result in modification of the genome.

Summary: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004016

Full paper: http://public-files.prbb.org/publicacions/72e67900-6a27-0131-59c6-525400e56e78.pdf