A Crucial Point, Well Expressed

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The rest of the chapter is devoted to retracing Darwin’s steps over the issue of variation under domestication, and again adds some detail but no new ideas. It is remarkable for what it leaves out. Crucially, Dawkins restates unequivocal terms Darwin’s key belief that we can safely and reasonably extrapolate direct and repeatable observations about variation and selection by skilled human hands (he gives plenty of uncontentious examples of this, just as Darwin did) to believe that there are NO limits to variation. The latter proposition would have to be true if Darwin were right, but it isn’t true, as we can observe.

Dawkins says a great deal about dog breeding, but ignores the programme about ‘pedigree dogs and mutant monsters' which I blogged about last year. This showed clearly that variation was strictly limited, and that while you could (as Dawkins reminds us) breed all kinds of dog from a wolf, you sooner or later come up against a rigid envelope. To approach the limit of the dog species envelope is to court disaster, as sterility and sickness appear due to inbreeding.

The 'evidence man' is very selective about what evidence he considers fit to print. Several times he insists that variation canot be limited, but he fails to consider the results from dog breeding which show that dogs are always dogs, and when you breed them too far from the created original, sick and sterile dogs.

WARNING-Species envelope ahead-no through road.

The species envelope, for dogs, sheep, cats, men, apples and all other living creatures, appears to be rigid and impassable. All sorts of varieties of dogs have been bred, but never anything that wasn’t a dog. Time doesn’t help, because the species envelope is reached quite soon (under selective breeding, which works far faster than natural selection)and natural selection would not even have progressed thus far, for reasons which Dawkins inadvertently acknowledged (as did Darwin). Left to themselves, pedigree dogs will interbreed and go back to the tougher, more ‘survivable’ mongrel. This means that they won’t even come near the boundaries of the species envelope, let alone pass through it. Unlike his imaginary walk through evolutionary deep time, this is a repeatable observation, a real experiment, not a ‘thought’ experiment. And the facts of the species envelope, which cannot be passed however hard breeders have tried, consigns Darwin’s dream of the unbroken tree of life to the dustbin of failed hypotheses [at least a tree caused by his purported mechanism, rather than a programmed unfolding --ed], and does so long before we get on to the subjects of genetic entropy and irreducible complexity.