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Author Topic: Darwin  (Read 19494 times)

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AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #90 on: March 11, 2015, 07:51:47 pm »
Robert Wayne, evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, studies Wolf and dog DNA. His results are discussed below.

The author starts out okay. The title, while admitting we have done damage by inbreeding, paradoxically brands dogs as parasites, instead of branding us as ethics free opportunists, totally  responsible for the dog DNA damage. That is a taste of the pity party for mankind the author dreams up after presenting the DNA study results.

I present snippets form the 3 part article because it provides hard evidence about wolf and dog DNA degradation.

The writer eventually goes off into evidence free evolutionary speculation. Instead of castigating mankind for bottlenecking wolf/dog DNA, dogs are praised for being the "SMART" wolves that "used" humans while the wolves that stayed in the wild are "less fit".    I think the author pushes fossil fuels and climate denial in his spare time.   :P

Recent explorations into the field of canine genetics are changing the way we think about man's best friend -- "man's best parasite" may be more like it -- and could help us repair the damage done by a century of inbreeding
by Stephen Budiansky

A few years ago Aguirre and several others decided to put on their scientists' hats and apply the tools of modern biology to the study of the dog genome. Their motivation was to try to understand the genetic roots of the particularly devastating inborn degenerative diseases that cause certain breeds -- notably, miniature poodles, Norwegian elkhounds, Irish setters, collies, and cocker spaniels -- to go blind. These diseases, characterized by night blindness followed by progressive deterioration of daytime vision, bear a striking similarity to the human condition known as retinitis pigmentosa.

More-conventional sponsors of scientific research, such as the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society, have begun to fund the study of canine genetics, because dog disease and human disease are turning out to be closely linked. More than twenty inborn diseases in dogs have been traced to specific defective genes; in every case the same defective gene has been found in human beings. Dogs even carry the brca 1gene, which was identified a few years ago as causing a significantly increased risk of breast cancer in women. Probably 90 to 95 percent of the dog genome and the human genome are identical.

Snippet 1
The view that dogs came along at about the same time as human beings settled down is so widespread and so often repeated in standard texts that it is more than a bit surprising to find genetic evidence flatly contradicting it. The evidence comes from a study by Robert Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, who has applied the modern tools of genetic fingerprinting to dogs, coyotes, wolves, and jackals.

Wolves and coyotes differ by about six percent in their mitochondrial DNA, and, according to fossil evidence, separated from a common ancestor about a million years ago. Wolves and dogs differ by about one percent; using the wolf-coyote time scale, this suggests that they parted company about 135,000 years ago -- a lot earlier than the date implied by the first distinctly non-wolflike dog fossil.

Snippet 2
Wayne's study also definitively laid to rest an assertion made by both Charles Darwin and Konrad Lorenz -- that more than one wild canid species had to have made an appearance in the dog's recent family tree, given the diversity of physical types and behaviors exhibited across the range of modern dog breeds. In fact, long sequences of dog mitochondrial DNA are similar or identical to those in gray wolves, and analysis of the highly variable markers in the regular DNA of dogs and wolves shows a considerable overlap there as well. Jackals and coyotes, though they can interbreed with dogs and produce fertile offspring, possess quite distinct groups of mitochondrial DNA sequences.

Snippet 3
The most striking discovery Wayne's team made was that there is almost no correlation between a dog's breed and the mitochondrial DNA sequences it carries. In eight German shepherds the scientists found five distinct sequences; in six golden retrievers they found four. And the same sequences repeatedly showed up in many different, and apparently quite unrelated, breeds. The Mexican hairless, or Xolo, a breed known from historical and archaeological records to have existed more than 2,500 years ago in Aztec Mexico -- and which presumably separated from Old World breeds some 12,000 years ago, when the Bering land bridge disappeared -- contained representatives of all the major mitochondrial DNA sequences found in dogs throughout the world. (The Xolo sequences also resembled those of Old World wolves much more closely than those of New World wolves.)

Snippet 4
Wayne's study also suggests that for a long time the genetic difference between a dog and a wolf was too small to cause any striking morphological change that would show up in the fossil record.

Snippet 5
Wayne's conclusion is that the earliest dogs "must have been integrated somehow into human society" to keep them genetically isolated from the surrounding population of wild wolves, and also that the domestication of dogs from wild populations must have been "a rare event" -- something that happened only a few times in history.

Snippet 6 (Agelbert NOTE: This is the mandatory bowing and scraping to the UNINTELLIGENT INTELLIGENCE of Natural Selection (i.e. evolution's "indispensable" mechanism). And even a quote form a SET high priest philosopher for us to all say "AMEN" to.  LOL!
The wonder and beauty of natural selection is that it is creative; it crafts solutions that for all intents and purposes seem to reflect intelligence -- "unthinking" intelligence, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett aptly put it. The evolutionarily correct way to state all this is that ... (speculation and story telling omitted by Agelbert - go to the link if you want to swallow it). If the author had been REALLY interested in the 'evolutionary correct way' (i.e. natural selection effects) to state this or that, he would have paid more attention to the DNA degradation of 150 years versus 100,000 years discussed at the end of the article. But he totally ignored the significance of that 'minor detail'.  ;) :evil4: 

Snippet 7 (Agelbert NOTE: ASS backwards logic used to JUSTIFY the alleged evolutionary advantage of the wolves that became dogs over the wolves that are still wolves. This, in the face of this study by Robert Wayne that PLAINLY established how genetically UNDIVERSE dogs are! WTF!).  ::)
Although wolves today are the most widespread wild land mammal in the world -- with a range that extends from North America to Europe to Asia, encompassing everything from semi-desert to tundra to subtropical forest -- their total population probably numbers no more than 150,000. In the United States there are about 50 million owned dogs and millions more unowned -- eloquent evolutionary testimony to the wisdom of mooching off people rather than fighting it out in the wild.

Agelbert NOTE: Did you get that? It's FAR BETTER to hang around humans and get 500 inherited genetic disorders than stay in the wild. There are millions and millions of more wolf mutants known as dogs than there are wolves, so dogs are OBVIOUSLY more "evolutionarily" successful. Does it ever occur to these wonders of pretzel logic what would happen to dogs if we weren't there? I guess not.

Remember, "mooching, ass kissing, bowing and scraping to Homo SAPs = evolutionary advantage".
NOT!


Snippet 8
By now nearly everyone has heard about the evils of inbreeding in dogs, and hip dysplasia and other hereditary diseases are forever being cited by animal-rights activists in their campaigns against pet ownership in general and dog breeders in particular. Such defects are often presented as the inevitable consequence of any attempt by humankind to manipulate or direct the evolution of a species toward characteristics it happens to fancy.

Agelbert NOTE: But PRIOR to 1870, Wayne's study shows dogs were doing okay in their genetic diversity.  :emthup:

Snippet 9
As Wayne's genetic data show, interbreeding and a flow of genes on a worldwide scale was continuing even as this segregation into types was taking place. The types were distinct in both physical appearance and behavior; they clearly had been selected with specific human aims in mind. But the crucial point is that these dogs were defined by form and function rather than by parentage. They were what livestock breeders would today call "open" or "grade" breeds.

Aglebert NOTE: And then came DARWIN.  :P

Snippet 10
Beginning around 1870, however, with the establishment of kennel clubs in Britain and the United States, closed breeding books were introduced in the name of developing and maintaining "purebred" animals. A dog could be registered as a Vizsla only if both of its parents were registered as Vizslas. There was more than a little racist thinking behind all of this; writings about animal breeding from the late 1800s and early 1900s are full of exhortations to eliminate "weaklings" and to invigorate the race by maintaining the "purity" of its "blood lines."
Look up any bibliography of dog books and the name Leon Fradley Whitney is sure to appear. Whitney was the author of many standard works, including The Complete Book of Dog Care (still in print), This Is the Cocker Spaniel, Bloodhounds and How to Train Them, and How to Breed Dogs.
What you won't find in a dog bibliography is some other Whitney works, including The Case for Sterilization, a paean to eugenics published in 1934. It was such a definitive treatment that the author received a letter of appreciation from no less an authority on the subject than Adolf Hitler. (Whitney in turn publicly hailed Hitler's "great statesmanship" in ordering the sterilization of the feeble-minded and the insane. In an unpublished autobiography written four decades later Whitney still defended his stance, maintaining that "no ruler ever before had had the courage or the knowledge to put sterilization to work." He allowed, however, that in the 1930s he had not been aware "what a vile human being" Hitler was.)

Snippet 11
Genetic data confirm that the past century of dog breeding has produced some extremely inbred animals. Surveys using gene markers show that the chance that two members of a typical human family will have a different combination of genes at a given site is about 71 percent. In crossbred dogs it is 57 percent, in most purebred dogs 22 percent, and in some rare breeds four percent. Even crossbred dogs are more inbred than the most inbred human populations (the Amish, for example, or families in India in which uncle-niece marriages take place).

Snippet 12
Many breeds suffer from the "popular sire effect" as well, and here criticism of the breeding world is more justifiable. A stud dog that wins a blue ribbon at a major show may father hundreds of litters, swamping the gene pool with his virtues -- and defects -- and crowding out some other ancestral lines altogether. The problem is worse in breeds that have gone through a genetic bottleneck. A number of breeds that exhibit strange recessive ailments, including Irish wolfhounds, flat-coated retrievers, Portuguese water dogs, and Shar-Peis, almost disappeared at some point during this century and were reconstituted from very small populations.

Snippet 13
Fixing the Damage
One strikingly counterintuitive conclusion of modern genetic studies is that the worst way to correct these mistakes of the past is to weed the carriers of genetic diseases out of the breeding population. The central fallacy of the racist view of eugenics was embodied in the claim that purity is genetically invigorating. In fact just the opposite is true -- genetic diversity is invigorating (thus "hybrid vigor," well known to agricultural breeders), because it helps to ensure that breeding for homozygosity in desirable traits doesn't at the same time breed for homozygosity in undesirable traits at other sites on the genome.  :emthup:

Snippet 14
A number of breeders are seeking genetic probes not to detect disease but rather to measure "genetic purity" -- to test, for example, if a Vizsla really is a Vizsla, or if (horrors) tainted blood has crept in. But breeding for the purity of the breed is like hiring a storyteller not on the basis of how well he tells stories but after looking at how many generations of Irishmen he has in his background.  :emthup:  :icon_mrgreen:

Snippet 15
We can take some reassurance, too, from the fact that mutts, owned and unowned, will always be with us.  :emthup: :icon_sunny: Despite the efforts of neo-eugenicists    :evil4: to ostracize them, mutts constitute a vibrant reservoir of canine genetic diversity. Mutts tend to be healthy dogs, because of hybrid vigor. They also tend to be good dogs.  
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99jul/9907dogs2.htm

Agelbert NOTE: I agree with the author that mutts are less degraded than the pure (crap) breeds.

However, I do not agree that the dog is as robust genetically as the wolf or the allegation that the wolf "used" humanity to get a free lunch. That's backwards. The evidence of DNA degradation shows which species is the guilty party here.

And the evidence certainly DOES NOT point to "undoing" the damage with mutt diversity just because the Darwinian "pure bloodline" bullshit didn't take off until 1870. The old "blink of an eye" (trick to lowball the DNA damage we have done) in evolution, as the author defines the last 150 years, ASS-U-ME-S that the damage we FORCED on the dog in 150 years can be undone in the same time period. NOPE! Mankind does not have that skill. But we are supposed to trust that science will "someday soon" figure it all out. SURE! So that's why they want to EXPERIMENT on the dogs! They are just trying to help the DOGS out, not humans. LOL!

Let's stop with the wishful thinking, okay? Let's look at the FACTS about the present DNA dog situation. They target dogs as a 'model' for experimentation BECAUSE they DON"T **** KNOW who stop the DNA degradation BOX CANYON we put the dogs in. If they KNEW how to stop the 500 inherited genetic disorders, they would ALREADY have gene therapy for them. THEY DON'T!

But there is more. There convenient 'evolution' blink of an eye isn't doing the natural selection math, according to the Wayne study. They are lowballing the **** out of how long it would take to 'fix' the dog DNA to where it was before the 19th century BECAUSE we Homo saps, according to Wayne's study, forced MORE deleterious selection pressures on dogs in 150 years than said dogs experienced (allegedly at the hands of "less enlightened' Homo saps prior to Darwin - NOT!) in the previous 80 to 100 THOUSAND years!  :o


According to the study, at least 80,000 YEARS went by while the wolf/dog genetic diversity barely changed! That means the WE FORCES MULTIPLES of SELECTION DNA DEGRADATION of the 80,000 years time period. We VISITED, maybe a million years of natural selection subtraction on those wolf/dogs in 150 years! We do not have a **** clue, biologically speaking, how to undue thousands of years of DNA degradation, PERIOD.

Homo SAPS did the crime. We need to accept our responsibility for it an resolve to demonize the (SET originated racist as well as unscientific) concept of PURE BREEDS altogether while we seek, through gene therapy and out breeding, to return the genetic diversity of the Grey wolf to the Dog as best we can, PERIOD. 


We are good at bottlenecks and lousy at diversity. So it goes. ALL inbreeding should be punishable by prison and fines. All kennel clubs and breed names should be considered an assault on common decency. NO breed should EVER be allowed to breed with another member of it's Homo SAP arbitrarily, selfishly and opportunistically created "breed", PERIOD.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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