Genetics and Neanderthals

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samiam1611 said:
“Carnivorans evolved from miacoids about 55 million years ago during the late Paleocene. Then, about 50 million years ago, the carnivorans split into two main divisions: caniforms (dog-like) and feliforms (cat-like). By 40 million years ago the first clearly identifiable member of the dog family Canidae had arisen. It was called Prohesperocyon wilsoni”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canid#Evolution
naturalhistorymag.com/features/15771/how-dogs-came-to-run-the-world

So where did Prohesperocyon come from in your opinion? Its ancestor was not a true canid so according to you…Prohesperocyon did not evolve from another animal. It must have just poofed into existence magically by an intelligent agent, right? :rolleyes:

Do you acknowledge the possibility that an intelligent agent could have have guided the process that led to the development of carnivorans–>miacoids–>caniforms + feliforms?

p.s. Faith1960, sorry for taking this way off track, but here, I will bring it back to the OP: Could Adam and Eve, our first parents, have come about like Susie?
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Poofed? :rolleyes:

Take a look at facilitated variation

Consider the Genetic Piano
 
buffalo said:
Poofed? :rolleyes:
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Didn’t think so :). So what is your explanation for how Prohesperocyon (or whatever you think the first canid was) came to exist, since the species before that was not a canid? Seriously, I’m asking. If you believe in “common ancestry only for those that are progeny of the kind they started as” I would like to know where you think the progeny came from.
Take a look at facilitated variation
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Consider the Genetic Piano
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Interesting, but I don’t get it. :o What’s that got to do with the appearance of the first “kinds.”
 
samiam1611 said:
You do believe in common ancestory in some sense though, don’t you? i.e. the domestic dog and the dingo are descended from gray wolves. So dogs and dingos have a common ancestor.
(Granted, they are all the same species, just different sub-species, but it’s the same concept.)

It’s not like there were no dogs and then poof, there were 2+ dogs. It’s not like 2 wolves gave birth to a pug for example. The first dogs were very wolf-like. And they could breed with wolves, so they did not need more dogs around to breed with. To go further back: the ancestor to the gray wolf is Canis lepophagus - a different species. But it’s not like Canis lepophagus gave birth to the first wolf. The first wolves were very lepophagus-like. I assume they were close enough that they could breed with the lepophagus.

Speciation is very gradual. So no, the male and female of a species do not need to be created simultaneously. They breed with other ones around them.

Say some humans have essentially domesticated some wolves, and named them Daisy, Daffodil, Spike, and Spot. They were the cutest and nicest of the ones around. The humans breed Daisy and Spike, and they have a litter of pups, and their pups are really REALLY nice. They are so nice, they can be considered dogs. They wag their tails and “woof” instead of howl.

Spot and Daffodil have a litter but their pups are just average nice. They are just nice wolves, not dogs. They howl, they don’t woof. They let the humans pet them, but they don’t get all excited and joyful like Daisy and Spike’s pups. But the pups from Daisy and Spike’s litter can still breed with Spot and Daffodil’s litter.

On and on they got nicer and nicer and cuter and cuter so that Daisy’s, Daffodil’s, Spike’s, and Spot’s great great great great great great great grandpuppies are so nice and cute, they would not be mistaken as nice wolves, they really are dogs.

Other great great great great great great great grandpuppies of Daisy Daffodil Spike and Spot became dingoes though when their human owners brought them to Australia.

The same thing happened with their ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors’ all the way back except their ancestors developed from natural selection, not human selection.

So just think of how different pugs are from wolves - it only took ~13,000 years for wolves to become pugs. Imagine how dramatic changes could occur given millions of years - surely enough to make the common ancestory of canids, felids, and other mammals believable…

If you have trouble believing that, say, cows and jellyfish have a common ancestor, I can understand that. But it shouldn’t be too hard to believe mammals having common ancestory. And once you accept that…the rest starts to make sense too.

🙂
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But dogs are not descended from wolves.
 
rossum said:
You are incorrect. Dogs are domesticated wolves. See: Pang et al, 2009.

The scientific evidence is against you.

rossum
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I would like someone to explain to me how dogs are descended from wolves. All the wolves were the same so how did we get the first different breed of dogs that did not look like a wolf.
If you breed a male and female wolf the puppies are wolves and whether still wild or domesticated they still are wolves, not dogs.
 
thistle said:
I would like someone to explain to me how dogs are descended from wolves. All the wolves were the same so how did we get the first different breed of dogs that did not look like a wolf.
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All wolves are not the same, any more than all humans are the same. There are genetic variations within populations of wolves. You could do DNA testing to determine parentage among wolves in the same way as you can among humans, or any other animal.

By selecting for the less aggressive, more co-operative, variants among wolves, humans domesticated them. A similar experiment has been done on Russian foxes: Domesticated Silver Fox.
If you breed a male and female wolf the puppies are wolves and whether still wild or domesticated they still are wolves, not dogs.
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Which is why domestic dogs are now usually classified as Canis lupus. This is the way the nested hierarchy works. We are descended from primates, so we are still classified as primates. Further back we are descended from Tetrapods so we are still classified as Tetrapods. Even further back we are descended from Deuterostomes, so we are still classified as Deuterostomes.

When you think about evolution in the long term, it is a mistake to use typological thinking, as you are doing here. For example, in terms of evolution, birds are dinosaurs, despite most people thinking of them as two different things.

Each wolf is slightly different from its parents. Over time, and under selection pressure, those slight differences add up to large differences. When men started domesticating wolves, the selection pressure was that unsuitable puppies were killed. Only the more suitable puppies were kept and allowed to breed. That can make for strong selection pressure. The Russian fox experiment showed results in fifty years; domesticating wolves was probably less systematic, and took longer, but that shows how short the timescale could be.

rossum
 
thistle said:
I would like someone to explain to me how dogs are descended from wolves. All the wolves were the same so how did we get the first different breed of dogs that did not look like a wolf.
If you breed a male and female wolf the puppies are wolves and whether still wild or domesticated they still are wolves, not dogs.
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It’s no different than dog breeding really. Think of pugs. (my favorite :)) Although their ancestry is unclear bc they are so ancient, they might be descended from pekinese, shar peis and/or mastiffs.
The Chinese royalty wanted small lap dogs. (Apparently they wanted smushy faces and curly tails too.) So they chose the smallest, sweetest, friendliest, and smushiest of the shar peis and/or mastiffs. (Pekinese are already small and kinda smushy, though not wrinkly.) Anyway, eventually they had a small smushy-faced docile lap dog that resembled the pugs we see today. It took a little more selective breeding to get it just right. Old pictures of pugs show them to be not as smushy (and not as cute of course ;)) and a little more athletic than today’s pugs. Now dog breed clubs have set breeding standards though so they’re not going to change anymore I don’t think.

With wolves, they chose the “least wild” ones. The ones who cooperated or tolerated humans instead of the mean ones. Timid ones not aggressive ones. Other phenotypic and genotypic changes occurred incidentally such as coloring and their voice (howl → woof) and just generally cuter (neotany).
The nice cute wolves had nicer cuter wolves until eventually they got distinctive dog-like traits such as woofing. They were dogs. 🤷 You can’t p(name removed by moderator)oint the first litter of dogs. It was gradual, just like pugs.

It was gradual. Gradual gradual gradual.
 
Faith1960 said:
I know we’ve discussed this in previous threads, which veered off in all kinds of directions, but,…I found this brief article in my email this afternoon, coming from Beliefnet, and it’s bugging me. Instead of going off in all directions as most threads tend to do, I’m hoping for a succint answer from a Catholic who knows his/her stuff. Does this contradict the Biblical and Catholic teaching that we’re literally desended from Adam and Eve?

blog.beliefnet.com/news/?p=4462&source=NEWSLETTER&nlsource=11&ppc=&utm_campaign=Bible&utm_source=NL&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term=aol.com
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In other words, all Europeans, Orientals and Native Americans are … descended from cavemen, but Africans are not?
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This is completely misstated. There was a long debate over whether Neanderthals were a separate species, or only a subspecies. Now that there is evidence that early Cro-magnon people interbred with Neanderthals, we know the answer is “sub-species.” Which does not mean lesser, it means different enough physically/culturally that they normally will not interbreed, but similar enough genetically that they can.

Because Neanderthals evolved from a variety of Homo erectus after that variety had migrated from Africa into western Europe, indigenous Africans, that is: those who’s ancestry traces back only in Africa where our species originated, did not have the opportunity to interbreed.

We are not “descended from cavemen” and Africans are not. There was simply some genetic intermixing. All humans trace their genetic ancestry back to Africa where the earliest modern Homo sapiens migrated from and into the fertile crescent.

The Catholic Church does not teach that we are “literally descended from Adam and Eve.” You may hold that belief if you wish, but it is not a Church position that Genesis is a literal rendering of events.
 
 
Julia_Mae said:
The Catholic Church does not teach that we are “literally descended from Adam and Eve.” You may hold that belief if you wish, but it is not a Church position that Genesis is a literal rendering of events.
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The Catholic Church teaches Divine Revelation which is that all humanity is descended from the first, real, true, sole parents of the human species.

Please read paragraph 390 in the *Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition. *To understand the whole picture regarding the origin of human nature, one should begin with the Catechism’s paragraph 355 and go straight through to paragraph 421. Enjoy!

This universal *Catechism *is the modern teaching for the 21st century. Both Pius XII and
Paul VI are included as their teachings are relevant today. See footnotes 264 and 265 for paragraph 390.
 
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