The ID Report
Post details: National Geographic's fancy pouters
04/28/05
National Geographic's fancy pouters
National Geographic's fancy pouters: Under all that fluff lurks a plain old "Do Not Feed" pigeon!
In recent blogs I addressed the editor's comments, but now let's look at the photos and text. To start, on pages 3 and 17 are some fine photos of fancy breeders' pigeons, and page 16 features an impressive bulldog. Pigeons, like dogs, can be bred to a variety of appearances. Darwin studied fancy pigeon breeding in order to see whether these captive creatures might help him understand how a pond full of amoebas can turn into the French academy.
The trouble is, they don't help us. When pigeons are taken from the wild, artificially segregated, and bred to produce a distinct type, two facts stand out:
a) The breeding decisions are acts of intelligent design, not Darwinian survival of the fittest. The fancy products of human design compare to the natural bird in about the same way as the fancy pet rat compares to the wharf vermin. Almost all the ways in which the human-bred type differs from the wild type make it less fit, not more fit. So Darwinian evolution is precisely what the fancy bred animal cannot contribute to.
b) Segregating birds (or dogs, horses or other animals) in this way enables characteristics that were always possible in the wild type to be artificially protected from the cruelties of nature. If the creatures are released into the wild, any survivors return to a generic type that still offers the fancy possibilities but expresses the ones most likely to promote survival.
Thus, your local urban park is overrun with Do Not Feed pigeons, not a variety of fancy pouters.
So we have not turned a pond full of amoeba into the French academy. All we have done is expressed some interesting possibilities in a protected setting.
Darwin hoped that after millions of years a natural selection process might cause a new type of bird to somehow arise from the pigeon without the input of intelligent design. Could it happen? Maybe, … but fancy breeding does not demonstrate that. Stay tuned. This gets to be even more fun later.
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