Information Related to "Myths of Evolution - Part 2"
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As we saw in the first part of this series in the last issue, Charles Darwin presented in his book, The Origin of Species, what he thought were numerous examples from the animal world to support his theory of evolution. But do they? Let's examine some other supposed proofs and see how well they have fared some 150 years later.
Pigeon breeding: artificial versus natural selection
In the beginning of The Origin of Species, Darwin stressed the importance he attributed to domestic breeding as a proof from analogy for his theory.
"At the commencement of my observations," he notes, "it seemed to me probable that a careful study of domesticated animals and of cultivated plants would offer the best chance of making out this obscure problem [of how evolution works]. Nor have I been disappointed; in this and in all the other perplexing cases I have invariably found that our knowledge, imperfect though it may be, of variation under domestication, afford the best and safest clue" (1958, p. 29, emphasis added throughout).
Darwin himself bred pigeons and was impressed with all the varieties that domestic breeders could develop. He explained in the first chapters of his book how pigeons could be bred to have a large variety of tails, beaks and colors. He then proposed that if breeders, using artificial selection, could come up with such great changes in such a short time, how much more could nature, using natural selection and eons of time, produce wholesale changes in plants and animals.
He admitted it was only a hunch, for he had no direct evidence. Yet from this limited evidence of variation within species (today called microevolution) he went on to extrapolate complex changes that theoretically could lead to the formation of new species (macroevolution).
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