GONE TO THE DOGS
I recently watched a great PBS Nature documentary called Dogs That Changed The World. If you love dogs (or even like them a little), I highly recommend you check it out.
For you intelligent designers out there, here are a few interesting facts from the "dog show" ...
1) Dogs evolved from wolves to modern day canines in only 14,000 years.
2) Since the 18th century, the number of breeds has gone from 40 to about 400.
3) There is more genetic diversity between different breeds of dogs than there is between the members of any other animal on earth.
So, dogs are an evolutionary enigma. And we are witnesses to a phenomenon that usually takes millions of years. Fascinating!
posted by Trekking Left @ 4:28 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Well, humans and what they've done to get different dogs to breed, have certainly put a whole bunch of nurture into the nature of this evolutionary experiment, no?
Absolutely. But that's why I think it really shows evolution at work. The same thing we've done to dogs is what nature does to other animals. It's just that, in the case of dogs, it happened over a really short period of time. And we mostly wanted traits that had to do with appearance, where as nature usually brings out traits having to do with survival. The process, though, is the same.
I would emphasize, however, that the change from wolf to domestic dog was not our doing. That's the recent theory anyway.
I am beginning to suspect that adaptation occurs much faster than I previously thought. Look at the people in N. Korea, how small they are. Then Look at the U.S., how big the people here are. That only took 100 years give or take. The reason we don't see the process happening around us is because our lives are so short.
That's a good point, Mort. I don't know the exact numbers, but I think Americans are, on average, a couple inches taller now than we were in the 18th century.
The reason people are so short in North Korea is that there was a huge famine there.
The tallest people in the world right now aRE the Dutch. I'm not sure, but I don't think we are increasing in height any more, since there is so much poverty.
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