That's what comes from watching the Westminster dog show. They have breeds of dogs I won't believe are dogs until they show me the DNA.
Back-to-work placemarker.
That's where I got the idea. Sometimes TV coverage of athlete's siblings disasters detracts too much from the olympics.
Speaking of which, while watching the same broadcast (I was rooting for the Dalmatian for Best of Show) it occurred to me that Havoc's stubborn insistence that "dogs only come from dogs, and thus were always dogs" can be turned around to demonstrate its absurdity and falseness...
The same argument could be used just as (il)logically to argue that "dachshunds only come from dachshunds, and thus were always dachshunds" -- and likewise for any other breed of dog or any other animal (or variety of plant, etc.).
Clearly, something's wrong with his line of "reasoning", because we *know* that dachshunds didn't always exist, and in fact did not exist until recently. Even though breeding dachshunds to dachshunds produce "only" more dachshunds, the same could be said (just as misleadingly) about the non-dachshund *ancestors* of the line of dogs which eventually became dachshunds. And yet, even so, it's not like the "pre-dachshund" breed one day *pop* gave birth to a dachshund, which in Havoc's limited imagination is the "only" alternative explanation.
Instead, the ancestral line picked up, over many generations, a trait here, a different trait there, which gradually made the lineage become more and more "dachshund-like", until eventually the modern dachshund as we know it today came to be.
(The smae case is true of countless other dog breeds. And most people would be surprised to learn that a great many modern dog breeds didn't even exist 200 years ago, they have arisen rather recently, relatively speaking.)
So contrary to Havoc's simplistic belief, that the only two conceivable possibilities are either a) "like" can only ever give birth to *exactly* the same "like" forever and ever, or b) an animal suddenly *pop* gives birth to an entirely different sort of animal... Instead there's a third option, which is actually far more in keeping with both "common sense" and ordinary day-to-day observations (at least to anyone who actually pays attention or lives on a farm) -- animals give birth to not to *exact* copies of themselves, but to *variations* of themselves, and so on for the next generation, and the next, etc., and over large numbers of generations, the end result can actually be quite different from the original animals N generations ago. In fact, it was *specifically* comparisons to what people were *very* familiar with via breeding of domestic animals and new varieties and so forth, which Darwin called upon in order to explain his new Theory in his 1859 book, as being the familiar (animal breeding and plant cultivation) carried out to its logical consequences over longer periods of time than just the few human lifespans which are within the scope of human observation.
What farmers and plant cultivators had long known in Darwin's own time 150 years ago, Havoc *still* hasn't managed to grasp even today -- his arguments about what "can" and "can't" happen when animals reproduce flies reveals a profound ignorance of things which the most illiterate farmer hundreds of years ago already knew full well.