Those who call themselves evolutionist's are trying to put a puzzle together with so very many pieces...............................missing; so they create there own......................pieces. Ha

Could someone explain the purpose of this thread ?

Can we tamper with that which is natural. Nope If we did, then it wouldn't be natural. It would be interfered with.

What is natural is.....spot on perfect.

Entirely to perfect to be considered random.

Those who call themselves evolutionist's

with little thought given to all the ways man is different to animal

Darwin was just trying to satisfy his intellectual curiosity, nothing more. He wanted an explanation and had no faith to understand any other way.

Why, today, if he were still alive, he would deny what he thought then.

Just because one is said to be a scientist, doesn't mean what they are doing is good and true.

Everyone wants to live and it is thought if we could just sever that link, physically, of what we are now to what is the animal, we would be totally...................human!

WE WERE NOT THEM; one has to have a very sharp knife to make that fit and it just....................won't!

We arrived not a moment to early or too late in the grand plan.

Now, who is behind that selection process? God, that's who.

They are considered "MUTATIONS".

Brilliant, but stupid! What is stupid about it is giving little regard to what is "unknown" and thinking that which is unknown, doesn't exist.

Chaos will never be understood, only eliminated.

Perhaps I did carry it a little to far. What I am saying is natural selection is natural beyond all comprehension and you can't tamper with it and there are those who think they can. One day hopefully you will catch up and come to understand what is natural and what is not.

William

Perhaps I did carry it a little to far.

What I am saying is natural selection is natural beyond all comprehension and you can't tamper with it and there are those who think they can.

Me too -- sorry I don't need to change the world just because we disagree.

William, what it comes down to in the end is that the natural processes that select are valueless. They don't know natural from unnatural.

Humans are responsible for the extinction of the moa, the passenger pigeon, the dodo, etc. These are examples of terminal selection (my phrase), i.e. artificial or not we DID tamper with the natural way of things and there it was. A plague could have wiped them out too. But it was humans.

Every dog from the chihuahua to the greyhound is a descendant of the gray wolf. Human selection (i.e. breeding) produced this diversification.

And so what if we can go play with genes now -- the only difference in the end is efficiency and precision.

um...the gray wolf thing...maybe not exactly.

From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication.

Abstract:
Artificial selection is the selection of advantageous natural variation for human ends and is the mechanism by which most domestic species evolved. Most domesticates have their origin in one of a few historic centers of domestication as farm animals. Two notable exceptions are cats and dogs. Wolf domestication was initiated late in the Mesolithic when humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Those wolves less afraid of humans scavenged nomadic hunting camps and over time developed utility, initially as guards warning of approaching animals or other nomadic bands and soon thereafter as hunters, an attribute tuned by artificial selection. The first domestic cats had limited utility and initiated their domestication among the earliest agricultural Neolithic settlements in the Near East. Wildcat domestication occurred through a self-selective process in which behavioral reproductive isolation evolved as a correlated character of assortative mating coupled to habitat choice for urban environments. Eurasian wildcats initiated domestication and their evolution to companion animals was initially a process of natural, rather than artificial, selection over time driven during their sympatry with forbear wildcats

If there was a split before the modern gray wolf arrived, dogs are not then descended from them

Oddly enough, some modern wolves have dog ancestors - it's thought that black wolves have domesticated dog genes.

coppinger's idea is that the village dog canid developed during the same period as modern gray wolf developed, and village dog became at first, self domesticated - not a process of human domestication of gray wolf.

Teaching the Case

The case is designed to address concepts of interpreting phylogenies and seeing how natural selection can result in speciation. The speciation event (data suggest that it happened at least four times) involves an ancestral wolf species that gave rise to the modern dog and gray wolf. However, two looming questions may be on students' minds.

Perhaps I did carry it a little to far. What I am saying is natural selection is natural beyond all comprehension and you can't tamper with it and there are those who think they can. One day hopefully you will catch up and come to understand what is natural and what is not.

William

Paul, that article reads like an expanded Reader's Digest circa 1970 - but with spelling mistakes. Ever heard of a "herd of dear" ?

The problem you are experiencing is due to your equivocation: of "wolves" with "gray wolf" i.e. "Gray wolf" is a modern species with an associated scientific name, the latin binomial.

We don't say that we are descended from chimpanzees. You know that example, and need to apply the same reasoning here.

The preponderance of molecular evidence points to an origin of dogs from the wolf, Canis lupus (27, 28). The molecular findings are also supported by a large body of archaeological evidence that implicates the Near East as a likely locus of definitive domestication [although dog domestication may have begun in Central Europe as early as the Upper Late Paleolithic (17, 26)]. Wolf domestication is seen as the result of 2 interwoven processes originating >14,000 years ago during our hunter-gatherer nomadic period (29). First, a founder group of less-fearful wolves would have been pulled toward nomadic encampments to scavenge kills or perhaps salvage wounded escapees from the hunt. Thereafter, these wolves may have found utility as barking sentinels, warning of human and animal invaders approaching at night (30). Gradually, natural selection and genetic drift resulting from human activities began to differentiate these wolves from the larger autonomous population. Once people had direct interaction with wolves, a subsequent, "cultural process" would have begun. Suitable "preselected" wolf pups taken as pets would have been socialized to humans and unconsciously and unintentionally selected for decreased flight behavior and increased sociality (26), 2 trademarks of tameness. Eventually, people established control over proto-dog mating. From this point forward the wolf in effect became a dog, under constant observation and subject to strong artificial selection for desired traits. Selection for tameness entails morphological and physiological changes through polygenes governing developmental processes and patterns (26, 31), and these provide grist for the mill of further iterations of selection. For wolf domestication, the phases of natural and artificial selection blend one into the other, eventuating in "man's best friend" with doting and obedient behaviors. Although dogs have been prized as household companions for thousands of years, the wide phenotypic variation of modern dog breeds began more recently (3,000-4,000 B.P.), leading to the ≈400 breeds recognized today by the Dog Breeders Associations (32).

Analysis of ancient sequences from New World dog remains from localities as distant as Peru and Alaska supports the hypothesis that ancient and modern dogs worldwide share a common origin from Old World gray wolves.

The wikipedia article? Yeah, it's weak. But the PNAS article is very good.

The scientific name, Canis lupus, is what today is called the gray wolf, and Canis lupus is genetically ancestral to domesticated dogs.


I hear you, but it's not entirely the same reasoning -- humans and chimps diverged from their common ancestor more than 5 million years ago. Modern dogs and modern wolves diverged from their common ancestor only around 10,000 years ago (according to everything I've read on the subject, at least). Indigenous Americans diverged from other human populations more than 30,000 years ago, and the same is true for Australian aboriginals. The human diaspora from Africa may have happened as much as 100,000 years ago. But you'd never speak of Quechuans, Inuits, Aboriginals, Celts, and Khoisans as if they're different species. They're all the same species and that's true whether you use the common name or the scientific taxonomic name.

And of course it turns out that human populations have developed considerable morphologic differences in these few 10s of thousands of years. It happened faster in dogs because they were specifically bred for it (and they have a much shorter generation time than humans).

It's fair if you want me to prove the gray wolf thing with references. I'll see what I can do. I don't think we disagree all that much -- the only real question at hand is whether this common ancestor of modern gray wolves should be considered the exact same species, and based on what we call human ancestors from that same time period, the answer would be yes.


Here is an excerpt from the PNAS article. If you PM me your e-mail I'll send you pdf copies of the original, as well as their references 27 and 28 that describe Canis lupus as the ancestor of dogs. (I haven't looked at those two references yet to see if they use the term "gray wolf" versus "wolf", just out of curiosity).




EDIT -- one of the primary references specifically says "Old World gray wolf" as the ancestor of modern dogs. There are New World gray wolves too -- I'm not up for asking the question as to how closely related old and new world gray wolves are, but let's just leave it at "wolves" or "Old World gray wolves" :flowers:

What DNA do we have of the ancestors, that it can be said that modern gray wolf (Canis lupus ), and any wolf-like animals from 140,000 years back are the same species ?

Isn't there any BETTER reasoning than that, to say it is only a 10,000 year-old split from wolves ?

You know full well that you can estimate the date of genetic divergence without having ancestral specimens, though.

The dating doesn't have to be down to the year, I mean an estimate +/- 5000 years would be incredibly precise. There is no order of magnitude degree of error here.

Better reasoning for what?

and apparently that may have happened way further back than was thought by some

there is an assumption that man took new wolf cubs from dens, rather than that wolves split into village dogs long ago, and then became domesticated dogs, with some becoming feral from there, some later mating back with gray wolves, and so on.

That is different than what I've read about it -- do you have references that we could look at?

That's completely different than what I've read about it -- I've already provided a bunch of citations that assume in their very text that peridomestic wolves had been hanging around for a long time.

The 10-14,000 year span has to do with the diversification of these animals -- not with how long they happened to hang around settlements.

There are a lot of squirrels and crows that hang around my house -- but I'm not breeding them for curly tails or for smiley beaks. Wolves may have hung around with people for eons, but the massive diversification only happened when people began to breed them -- and that's all that's really traceable with genetic tools.

but if some crows are less prone to fright reactions to people, they may become a population separated from the others.

One thing wrong with your analogy is that neither crow nor squirrel provide such obvious advantage to human.

what do you mean by diversification ? creation of recognizable breeds ?

Right, they might be. There is a limitation to the resolution of these techniques -- nothing wrong with that.

You understand my analogy, though. It doesn't matter -- you're sort of dispersing a rather simple point I'm making. My point was solely that at some point the ancestor to modern dogs greatly diversified thanks to selective breeding. That's it!!!

That was the whole point I was making from the beginning, in response to an admonition about artificial selection by the original poster -- and we're now suddenly off on this tangent of canine minutiae. Yes, I acknowledge all the error in doing genetic dating. Yes, I acknowledge that taxonomic and common names are incapable of accounting for genetic diversity between subpopulations. Yes, I acknowledge that I take the 10-14,000 year time span for granted just because I've read a few papers that provide that estimate. But I didn't introduce the topic to debate you about what the ancestor of dogs should be called, or about any of this other stuff.

YES, because that is what the studies have looked at specifically!!! They look at morphologically distinct breeds and account for the genetic differences between them. This allows them to understand what sort of genetic variability accounts for the vast morphologic differences, and also allows them to estimate when they genetically diverged.