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To: Cicero
"It’s not blind chance that results in different breeds of dog."

It's also not "blind chance" that results in different species. Evolution does not operate by "blind chance." Point mutations do... but they only increase genetic diversity... replacing the genetic diversity lost through natural (or artificial) selection. And that is only half of the process, providing raw material than can then be acted on by selection.

But the selection itself is anything but "blind." It instead is driven by external and objective standards of fitness, driving inexorably towards those standards in a completely deterministic and non-random way.

What the article misses here is actually the key point... modern varieties of dog lay completely outside the natural variation of their wild lupine ancestors. Not only has artificial selection taken advantage of the natural genetic variation of wild wolves, it has also taken advantage of new genetic information that arose during the period of domestication via random mutation.

Dogs are not only the result of selection, they contain a vast amount of evolutionary innovation that cannot be blamed on an "intelligent" breeder.
31 posted on 01/27/2010 10:38:23 AM PST by EnderWiggins
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To: EnderWiggins

Well, actually, Darwinian theory says that each instance of gene selection and mutation IS blind chance. But then “survival of the fittest” intervenes and selects those changes and mutations that are favorable, and the unfavorable ones die off.

—Bean


32 posted on 01/27/2010 11:36:07 AM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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