Kent Hovind misuses the Belyaev fox farm experiment to claim that all the dogs, both wild and domestic, came from two of the "dog kind" that were on the ark.
Boy, this is a good one!
First, let’s look at some facts regarding dogs. Most experts say there are about 400± recognized breeds of dogs in the world today. Most also agree that they are all interfertile (can produce puppies) and are therefore the same “kind” of animal. Ten times in Genesis chapter one, God said the plants and animals would bring forth after their “kind,” not their species.
The use of the word “species” sometimes clouds our communication, as there has never been an airtight definition of the word “species.” Darwin’s book entitled, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life never does tell us about the ORIGIN of species at all. He only covered his unproven ideas on how he thinks species might have changed over the “millions of years” he claimed that the world has possibly been here.
It is true that there are a wide variety of dogs on earth today but please consider the following list of facts. Yes, my mind works best from lists. :
All the evidence that mankind has ever been able to observe shows us that dogs produce dogs.
While there are small dogs and large dogs, there seems to be a limit. I would be willing to bet no one will never get a dog as small as a flea or as big as Texas.
Dogs also seem able to “adapt” to various climates. Some can survive at -30F in Alaska and others have “adapted” to ±120 in deserts. Again however, there are limits. They will never adapt to ±300F! Or 10,000F!!!
I have had several people who raise dogs for a living tell me that they can take fifty generic “mutts” from the dog pound and, with selective breeding, re-create nearly every breed of dog today in less than 100 years.
Richard Dawkins, famous English atheist who hates creationists (See the movie, “Expelled”. You can purchase it by clicking here), wrote a book in 2005 called The Ancestor’s Tale. On pages 29-31, he tells of a Russian science team that took captive silver foxes and bred them for “tameness.” In twenty years, they watched them change into dogs! They looked like border collies, sought human company, wagged their tails when approached, had black and white coats, had dog-like muzzles and “lovable” floppy ears, developed hormone changes to breed year round, and displayed less aggression. I think you will find that nearly everyone (creationist or evolutionist) agrees that all dogs could have descended from foxes or wolves with no problems.
To look at the really big picture, I think it is funny to listen to an evolutionists ask a creationist, “How could all the dogs in the world come from just two dogs on Noah’s ark?” and then turn around and teach that all the dogs in the world came from a rock! Over billions of years of course! (Or quickly if you are from Harvard!) On page 31 of The Ancestor’s Tale, Dawkins says, “It is entirely probable that cattle, pigs horses, sheep, goats, chickens, geese, ducks, and camels followed a course which was just as fast and just as rich in unexpected side-effects.”
Keep in mind that the changes needed to turn a wolf, fox, or jackal into a dog are minor compared to turning a rock into a dog or even an amoeba into a dog. I’m even willing to let them have the huge head start of not dealing with the major problem of the origin of life issue and letting them start with a hamster (already a mammal, air-breathing, and land-dwelling) and see if they can turn it into a dog.
Don’t be thrown off track by those who question God’s Word with their detail questions about Noah’s ark. I think there are plenty of great answers to nearly all the questions the atheists raise and I cover many of them in the Creation Seminar. For the questions for which we don’t have answers yet, keep seeking for truth and God will provide the answers as we go and as we need them.
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Of course, he makes no mention of what that dog kind was. We all know from credible creationist sources that this “dog kind” was the Afghan hound. That means that all dogs from gray foxes to bulldogs to maned wolves descend from that animal. Of course, that would that mutations occur within populations at a startling rate to create such amazing genetic and morphological variation.
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Hovind is right that the term species is very nebulous. I don’t consider domestic dogs to be a separate species from wolves, and I am skeptical that the red wolf and the Eastern timber wolf are separate species from the rest.
That said, I don’t think foxes are the same species as wolves. I don’t think dogs descend from foxes. I don’t know of a single person with any kind of credibility who thinks so. (No. Chihuahuas are not derived from fennec foxes!)
However, Kent thinks that’s a possibility because of the Belyaev experiment. He thinks that they actually created dogs (as in the same species as domestic dogs) through selecting for tameness alone. Yes. They look like border collies, but they are not border collies. They are genetically tame red foxes of the silver phase. This study is used as an analogy to see how domestication might have worked in domestic dogs in their evolution from wild wolves.
Hovind is correct that you could take a large population of randomly-bred dogs and, through an intense selective process, produce something like all the dog breeds we have today. That’s actually what happened in the past 150 years. The many generic and specialist working-type landraces were selected and “improved” into many different breeds. That happens because dogs are very susceptible to selective breeding. Although no one has bred one the size of a flea or the size of a Texas, but we have produced 20o-plus pound English mastiffs and chihuahuas that weigh less than two pounds. This diversity is reflected in the wild Canis lupus species, which once existed in such diverse forms as the 25-pound Honshu wolf to the giant Pleistocene wolf of Alaska with bone crushing jaws.
One of the reasons why dogs and wolves vary so much in appearance is just a little variation on a few genes have great effects upon phenotype. Just slight variations on one gene produces the great variance in size in domestic dogs. In addition, their DNA has an unusually high number of tandem repeats, which also means that they can rapidly evolve diverse phenotypes.
But if Hovind thinks the whole 35ish species in the dog family are derived from just two individuals of the “dog kind,” he must believe in super evolution. While it is true that golden jackals, coyotes, and Ethiopian wolves can crossbreed with both wild and domestic Canis lupus, fertility issues exist when dog/coyote and dog/golden jackal hybrids are bred to each other over the generations. These fertility issues strongly suggest that golden jackals and coyotes are distinct species, despite the fact that many of these hybrids are fertile. Although there is some anecdotal evidence that a crab-eating fox (which is a South American wild dog, a close relative of the genus Canis) crossed with a domestic dog, there have been no verified dog and fox hybrids. The dhole and painted wolf/African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) cannot hybridize with the members of the genus Canis, and no verified hybrids exist between black-backed jackals and side-striped jackals and other members of the genus Canis.
These animals cannot interbreed because they vary too much genetically.
How could all of this variation result from two dogs (which we all know were Afghan hounds) that were on the ark? We all know that breeding from two dogs in such a fashion would produce animals that have very little genetic diversity. They likely wouldn’t be able to reproduce after just a few generations of breeding from such close relatives.
Hovind totally misunderstands the literature on the dog family. Yes. The Belyaev experiment is very useful in seeing how the domestication process alone might have created all the interesting phases and types that occur in domestic animals.
The silver-phase red foxes in this experiment did become dog-like. They were still red foxes. They did not become dogs.
Would you take tax advice from someone like this?
