Natural Selection and what it didn\'t do for dogs... (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 03:24 (5414 days ago) @ BBella

Going back to dogs, it is true that all dogs can still interbreed and by the definition of species that I am familiar with, a pug isn't a different species than wolf. But my point was the source of variation. Everything inside of a wolf's DNA allows it to be a pug. Only the act of humans breeding for traits made goldens, pugs, poodles, etc. The variations you see from continent to continent in wolves are minor because the selection pressures are minor. The selection pressures for dogs are major and therefore you get all the variations that you see. There's no need in this scenario to posit anything other than sexual reproduction + selection as far as I can see.
> 
> I'm not arguing the fact above, but no matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to wrap my imagination around the process it took for two wolves to make a poodle, or for two chimps to make a man. I'm sure it's because I just don't have the intelligence it takes to imagine it.-Nonsense. Think of the process it takes in the example I was using, getting pugs from what was originally a wolf. -If it makes you feel any better, I have a huge standard poodle, and twice he woke me up in the middle of the night howling like a damn wolf. Scared the crap out of me until I realized that he was sleeping while doing it. Might be a few thousand years apart, but they're definitely anecdotally and genetically related.-[EDITED]-And by "nonsense," I mean that it's nonsense that you can't fathom it.

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