[balls]

Care to provide a source for that?

I'll second that question. You aren't actually mistaking dog breeding for evolution, are you, balls?

See: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/807641/posts

[Mr. Silverback]

I’m not saying that I’m not interested in the findings, but an article that has “bred for” in the first sentence has as much relevance to evolution as the existence of a Dodge Dart does.

[dennisw]

LOL!!!! I figured you were linking to that post on domesticating the silver fox same as has been done with dogs. I read Dawkins “The Blind Watchmaker” years ago and agree with him on some things. I also read EO Wilson books.

Evolution explains a lot but not everything. There might be a lot of intelligent design going on. Morphic resonance is also a factor

The strident, hard core evolutionists also are atheists and libertarians which is quite revealing. They are also scientists who get irrationally upset when evolution is challanged

[metmom]

In many ways, though, the question of intentionality is beside the point. Domestication was not a single event but rather a long, complex process. Natural selection and artificial selection may both have operated at different times or even at the same time.

And they expect us to believe that he did the same thing in one generation?

In setting up our breeding experiment, Belyaev bypassed that initial trauma. He began with 30 male foxes and 100 vixens, most of them from a commercial fur farm in Estonia. The founding foxes were already tamer than their wild relatives. Foxes had been farmed since the beginning of this century, so the earliest steps of domestication-capture, caging and isolation from other wild foxes-had already left their marks on our foxes' genes and behavior.

Ooops. Tainted sample already. If he was trying to prove the point of how our ancestors domesticated WILD dogs, he needed to start with WILD foxes, same as they.

Lazy, careless short cut.

To ensure that their tameness results from genetic selection, we do not train the foxes. Most of them spend their lives in cages and are allowed only brief "time dosed" contacts with human beings. Pups are caged with their mothers until they are I/2 to 2 months old. Then they are caged with their litter mates but without their mothers. At three months, each pup is moved to its own cage.

No, they did not tame the foxes. They left them alone in cages to ensure their wildness.

Honestly, if this is what passes for science, it's no wonder that most evos believe the TOE.

And that's just skimming the first part of the article.