2009-05-20 Are Dog Breeds Actually Different Species

2009-05-20 Steve Mirsky Scientific American \creationism vs. science\speciation\artificial selection http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=an-immodest-proposal Are Dog Breeds Actually Different Species? Are Dog Breeds Actually Different Species  Creationists argue that speciation has never been seen. Here’s part of a December 31, 2008, posting by Jonathan Wells on the Web site of the antithetically named Discovery Institute: “Darwinism depends on the splitting of one species into two, which then diverge and split and diverge and split, over and over again, to produce the branching-tree pattern required by Darwin’s theory. And this sort of speciation has never been observed.”

The claim makes me think of the trial where a man was charged with biting off another man’s ear in a bar fight. (Incredibly, Mike Tyson was not involved.) An eyewitness to the fracas took the stand. The defense attorney asked, “Did you actually see with your own eyes my client bite off the ear in question?” The witness said, “No.” The attorney pounced: “So how can you be so sure that the defendant actually bit off the ear?” To which the witness replied, “I saw him spit it out.” We have the fossils, the intermediate forms, the comparative anatomy, the genomic homologies—we’ve seen what evolution spits out.

...

As Darwin did before him, Coyne noted that the development of new [dog] breeds through artificial selection is a good model for the evo­lution of new species by natural selection. He then offered a comment about dog breeds, also found in his book: “If somehow the recognized breeds existed only as fossils, paleontol­ogists would consider them not one species but many—certainly more than the thirty-six species of wild dogs that live in nature today.”

&ldquo;If somehow the recognized breeds [of dog] existed only as fossils, paleontol­ogists would consider them not one species but many – certainly more than the thirty-six species of wild dogs that live in nature today.&rdquo;   