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by Scottie Westfall

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« Debates are not the place to take down creationists
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Ken Ham misrepresents canid taxonomy

February 5, 2014 by retrieverman

Ken Ham is known for using the dog family to defend the biblical concept of kind. After all, domestic dogs vary so much but can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, which they can also do with wolves (their wild ancestor), coyotes, and golden jackals.

So all these different animals must represent the dog kind, right?

Well, very early in the debate from last night , Ham went for the dogs again, comparing the different species and breeds of the genus Canis to Darwin’s finches. Darwin’s finches are more less divergent in morphology than all these dogs are, so they both must represent the respective dog and finch “kind.”

The problem is that all the weird morphology that exists in dogs is really nothing more than the selection pressures that have occurred since domestication. Domestic dog skull vary more than all the other species in the order Carnivora. That means that domestic dogs have skulls that diverge more than the differences between those of house cats and walruses. It is now thought that tandem repeats may play a role why dog heads have been able to become so diverse so rapidly through selective breeding, which is really nothing more than a really weird aspect of the dog genome.  Domestic dogs actually don’t vary that much from each other, and they also don’t vary greatly from wolves either, which is why they still have to be classified as Canis lupus familiaris.

Ken Ham bathers on how all these Canis were interfertile and thus the same kind, but here’s a challenge I guess he didn’t think about.

These two animals look very similar, and I’m sure that Ken Ham would say they are the same “kind.”

canis latrans

black backed jackal

If you didn’t know any better, you’d say that these two animals were the same speces, and if you were a creationist, you’d definitely say they were the same “kind.”

But if all living things on the earth now are all derived from an ancestral and clearly interfertile ancestral pair on the ark, then why can’t these two animals interbreed?

Yes.

The animal in the top photo is a North American coyote. It actually can interbreed with domestic dogs and wolves, and it has been bred to the golden jackal, which is actually far more closely related to the wolf and coyote lineage than the other jackals.

Indeed, there are two jackals that are found only in Africa that are not interfertile with the rest of the genus Canis. These two are the black-backed and side-striped jackals, which are even more divergent from the rest of the genus Canis than African wild dogs and dholes are.

The animal below is a black-backed jackal, and in Southern and East Africa it is ecologically quite similar to the Western and Latin American populations of coyote.

Because black-backed and side-striped jackals are genetically that distinct from the rest of the “dog kind,” then Noah surely would have had to have brought along a separate jackal kind.

But wouldn’t an all-knowing creator just ask Noah to bring the dog kind and populate Africa with an animal deriving from that ancestral dog kind? Having to put another pair of dog-like creatures on that already crowded boat seems like an awful waste. Kennel space was pretty limited.

Why go at it with such a divergent animal?

Most people don’t realize that these two endemic African jackals are so different from the rest of the genus Canis. Most have heard that golden jackals cross with dogs, and there is an assumption that all of these animals are very closely related.

They aren’t.

But if you were to play on this kind game a bit more, you’d think that these two animals would interbreed, and that there would be no way to breed a cute little dog like a beagle to a coyote. A black-backed jackal would be a much more logical mate, right?

beagle

 

But there have been several studies that have crossed laboratory strain beagles with coyotes (like this one: coyote beagle).

coyote beagle mated pair

 

The photo above is the male coyote protecting his beagle mate.

Here are their descendants:

beagle coydogs

Beagles and coyotes would clearly be part of the same kind, but coyotes and black-backed jackals would not.

But you’d never be able to guess that solely by looking at the animals.

And this is where the entire concept of “kinds” falls apart.

We have many different and often nasty debates about the taxonomy and classification of species, but we have these debates because we have some idea of what a species is.

The same cannot be used for the term “kind.”

A kind is really whatever one thinks it should be. It’s an ad hoc definition, one that is squishy and malleable, which means that it is perfect for people who like to misrepresent facts to twist around however they would like.

It’s precisely the sort of thing creationists like to use to bamboozle the science-illiterate public.

 

 

 

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Posted in creationism, wild dogs | Tagged beagle, beagle coydog, black-backed jackal, coydog, coyotes, Ken Ham | 16 Comments

16 Responses

  1. on February 5, 2014 at 3:11 pm chervilmeadow

    You explain these obvious truths very patiently, but do you know whether denialists like this Mr Ham and those of his persuasion ever get to read and respond to what you and others are saying? This “creationist” theory must have been adequately discredited by now – albeit some people still insist in saying there is a god, despite all the weight of evidence against that theory.


    • on February 5, 2014 at 3:21 pm retrieverman

      The problem is you’re dealing with people who hold a lot of stock in believing something that is crap, and if you debate someone who believes it, they get to defend the faith and it gives them more power.

      Because I’m not a scientist, I can do this as a layperson, but no real scientist should ever debate one.


  2. on February 5, 2014 at 4:11 pm M.R.S.

    Interesting that the coyote-beagle study is built on the studies done by Scott and Fuller at the Jackson lab. Their work, published as Genetics and Social Behavior of the Dog, is one of the most important books to reach the general dog-owning public. It is still fascinating reading.


  3. on February 5, 2014 at 6:12 pm Marg

    I must admit, I find your blog so interesting and indeed I am learning so much. So thank you for that. However, I must indeed be naive, because until I joined your blog I did not realise that there where still so many ‘Creationists’ out there. By the way, this may be a silly comment but how do the Creationists explain how Noah got hold of Kangaroos, Koalas and even platypus. I mean, Australia wasn’t even discovered during Noah’s time?


    • on February 5, 2014 at 9:10 pm retrieverman

      That was actually covered in that debate between Nye and Ham (who is Australian BTW).

      He didn’t have an answer for the question.

      The best attempt I’ve seen is to say that a thylacine was just a wolf with a pouch, and a thylacoleo was a lion with a pouch….

      That’s all they have.


      • on February 5, 2014 at 9:40 pm Marg

        Yes, unfortunately he is an Aussie, apparently he was a science teacher at a Brisbane High School and he has quite a few degrees from University of Queensland. The thylacine was once known as the Tasmanian Tiger or very rarely as a Tasmanian Wolf, however I cannot understand why as an Aussie he would make the comparison of mammal such as a wolf to a marsupial. Unbelievable, I suppose in every country there are idiots. I’d love to know his idea on platypus – a beaver crossed with a duck and some sort of marsupial ?


        • on February 10, 2014 at 8:27 am Monica of Hippo

          I’m not a supporter of Ken Ham or Creationism, but Ken Ham in that video did not equate the Tasmanian Tiger with a wolf.

          His answer to that “how did kangaroos get to Australia and cross seas without leaving any skeletal remains along the way” was an evasive comment to the effect of, “We don’t know what the land formation was like at that time. There was probably a land bridge which connected Australia to Asia through Indonesia.”

          The land bridge he needs has never been found.


          • on February 11, 2014 at 12:52 pm retrieverman

            There was never a land bridge.

            Also, I didn’t say Ken Ham said that, but Answers in Genesis, his website, once made that claim.

            Please learn to read more carefully before commenting and do not put words in people’s mouths.


  4. on February 6, 2014 at 6:37 am Oval 5

    Some are simply not meant to survive ;)


  5. on February 6, 2014 at 10:37 am peg4x4

    You are using “logic” and “reason”,they have a “Book”..


  6. on February 6, 2014 at 3:50 pm UrbanCollieChick

    It amazes me when people I know who are otherwise logical and reasonable continue to say we can never prove there is not a god. There are lots of arguments that should at least make one shake their head and say “Sigh, I guess I’m just hanging on to something that sounds nice and makes me happy, but deep down I know you’re right.”

    This is just one area where you get looked at as a villian if you shatter someone’s dreams.


  7. on February 6, 2014 at 8:31 pm chervilmeadow

    Maybe peripheral to the main topic, but with such huge weight of evidence being made public about a lot of priestly behaviour one wonders how the reputation of the catholic church can possibly survive it all for much longer.


    • on February 7, 2014 at 3:50 am Pai

      I’m honestly surprised there wasn’t more widespread outrage over the magdalene laundries that apparently were selling babies and enslaving single mothers for decades. There were some in the U.S. as well as in Ireland, and they were sweatshops of the worst kind.


  8. on February 8, 2014 at 1:08 pm massugu

    But the concept of “kind” is so simple and binary Scottie–it either is or it ain’t Evolution is just so dang messy doncha know, what with ring species, and mules and all that other stuff? (And ‘messy’ offends a lot of people, so lets just pretend that DNA, the fossil record, genetics and yucky stuff like that just don’t exist, shan’t we.)


  9. on February 10, 2014 at 8:18 am Monica of Hippo

    I don’t support Creationism, but I wouldn’t put it past Creationists to have this kind of a counter argument:

    The dogs and jackals were originally inter-fertile, but have since diverged genetically to the point of no longer being inter-fertile. What we observe here is the normal process of speciation within the “kinds”, but not the development of separate “kinds.”

    That is to say, Creationists would not accept that members of the dog kind evolved from tree shrews or any other non-dog ancestor. But they would accept that Black Backed Jackals evolved from a dog ancestor and that they are so divergent now that they cannot breed with other dogs any more.

    The “kinds” model doesn’t have to be delineated by the breeding boundaries which are still in existence today, it only needs to have existed in the murky past. That these “kind” boundaries were subsequently hidden by the growth of species is no falsification of the theory. After all, the Creationists’ constant refrain is that the past was different from the present, and different in fundamentally unmeasurable ways.


    • on February 11, 2014 at 12:53 pm retrieverman

      If that were true, you’d have animals with so many mutations that the genetic load alone would kill them all within just a few generations.



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