The only potentially truthful line in the article.
"Many researchers explain dog-breed diversity as the emergence of hidden traits in the genome."
The rest is a waste of time and money. Even as a layperson, I can tell these guys are out of their league.
You remain hilarious. Every time you post on this topic, I get an image of a monkey with its eyes clamped shut and its hands covering its ears, a grimace of extreme frustration on its face...
One more bit of evidence for evolution to add to the mountain. One more bit of serious annoyance to the Poofists. Gotta love it!
>Even as a layperson, I can tell these guys are out of their league.
And you can tell that... how? Because they reached a conclusion you don't like?
Introducing the Stretch & Squish Theory of Evolution
How do you stretch an arm into a wing, or a fin into a leg? This sounds like the silly putty theory of evolution. An intelligent kid can purposefully make things out of silly putty, but the putty by itself is silly and has no goal in mind. Put the silly putty into a random machine of moving parts and chaos results.
Other problems quickly evolve from this theory. What if the top of the dog’s snout gets stretched by a tandem repeat mutation, but the bottom jaw does not? The dog can’t eat. What if the mutated dog can eat, but cannot find a mate with the same mutation? And don’t these guys know that dog breeding is not evolution, but intelligent design?
For these and other reasons, this Silly Putty theory of evolution gets Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: their final sentence in the paper makes tandem repeats responsible for all the beauty and variety of living things:
How broadly this mode of evolutionary change is exploited [sic] in nature remains to be seen, but if the prevalence of repetitive elements within genes is any indicator, then mammals, insects, plants, and other genomes throughout the natural world may use this mechanism [sic] to achieve evolutionary agility.
“Evolutionary agility” – now there is an equivocation for the record books. How did a lizard learn to fly? By evolutionary agility. How did an ape learn to build spacecraft? By evolutionary agility. How did a dog learn to become a whale and dive deep into the ocean, navigating by sonar? By evolutionary agility. What an agile concept.
Papers like this diminish the prestige of the National Academy of Sciences. Peer review is supposed to prevent dumb ideas from getting published. If it were not for the desperation of the Darwin Party to keep sending new ideas up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes, they would have been forced to admit defeat long ago. This entry’s only value is in pointing out that the old neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection, acting on point mutations, is inadequate to account for the rapid change found in the fossil record. That is an admission that supports creation, not evolution.