Balderdash! Many of the numerous dog breeds have provided enhanced performance at the tasks for which they were developed. Similar improvements may be noted for all domesticated animal species and for practically all our food crops.
Trivially false.
Trivially false.
Cows are more docile and delicious then their wild varieties, and have thrived because of this.
Dogs are helpful and fun and now happily living in vast numbers across the planet while wolves are almost extinct.
EDIT: I mean, what Ophiolite said.
These are species with new traits for new environments. It's like saying that a polar bear's cold adaptations aren't improvements on the grizzly bear-like ancestor because they would kill them in the tropics.Only if protected from nature with houses, fences, and barns.
And fed by hand. That's like saying a goldfish is an improved species.
Wolf/Conservation status
Least Concern
Population stable
Please recall that biological improvements are not absolutes, but relatives. They are improvements relative to the environment they inhabit. You really ought to read Darwin's On the Origin of Species. His exposition of artificial selection and its relationship to natural selection is telling.
Telling? Darwin's assertion was that just as breeders could use selection to change the characters of a particular breed, nature too could select and thus modify a wild species. How can the breeding of plants and animals have a relationship to natural selection when after all it is indeed artificial and requires human intervention? Selective breeding takes certain characteristics and breeds the plants or animals based on these selections which means improvements at a cost? Other characteristics are lost resulting in populations that have less genetic diversity, producing plants and animals that are less fit, in the case of dog breeding, prone to disorders which is the opposite of "survival of the fittest" and in no way mirrors what is observed in the wild!
Human selective breeding mimics extreme pressures put on species in the wild. If there is a particular trait that becomes almost essential for survival, like for example resistance to an extreme plague, it will become the only trait that matters.
No. In nature when a new trait occurs that doesn't make or spontaneously appear in others of the population.
False. Glow in the darkness might well be a great advantage as a pet... but it wouldn't totally replace all cat advantages.
If by unnatural evolution you mean human directed engineering or selective breeding then they are totally relevant to the theory of evolution.
It's just a statement of fact about how the natural world works.
My "Agree" was prompted by this part of your post (though I do agree with the first part also). I am startled enough when my cat jumps onto the bed at 2:30 am, landing 1" from my nose, requesting a night time meal. If that event were intensified by converting a familiar face to a luminescent apparition I might well instantaneously gestate kittens of my own!
And @Gottservant , it is a process that effects populations, not the individual. Individuals cannot evolve. Changes in the somatic cells are not heritable. Changes in the germ cells benefit (or inhibit, or have no effect on) the offspring, not the individual whose germ cells have mutated.
Human selective breeding does not mimics what occurs in the wild. For instance using dog breeding from wolf ancestors as an example of how evolution would work in the wild is ludicrous because in one of the oldest example of a wolf is, as reported by the Japan Times, a wolf fossil said to be 1.7 million years old from Tokyo Japan. Characteristics of the wolf fossils were said to be almost identical to those of wolves seen today!
