I recently got into a funny debate with an ID proponent who turned me onto their saving grace, Nancy Pearcey.

Pearcey would argue against this as being evidence of evolution because we are merely guiding natural processes, we aren't making new life forms out of building blocks of atoms. She boldly states that we will never be able to make a cell.

She has no scientific background whatsoever. My favorite quote of hers:

"As arch-Darwinian Richard Dawkins said in a recent Salon interview, evolution produces "the illusion of design." The implication for science, as Richard Rorty elaborates so clearly, is that truth is not "out there" to be discovered but is merely a social construction. *Such postmodernist notions threaten to undercut the scientific enterprise.*"

Genes coding for enzymes are hard to mutate, its too easy to break one of these molecular machines, so gene control here would be a light-toggle that sometimes sparks.

But many developmental traits are controlled not so much by protein sequence, but by the timing/amount of their production. Much variation in dog breeds can be accounted for by varying repeats of what was once thought "junk" DNA between the transcribed gene and promoter sequences upstream.

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/52/18058.full

Repetitive DNA is commonly miscopied during meotic crossover, so there's a built-in source of variation that is more akin to a fader than a toggle. Its easy to imagine an isolated population drifting/being selected by "fader" increments till it was behaviorally or physiologically unlikely to interbreed with the parent population, and speciation occurs. If it outcompetes the parent species, voilla the paleontologic punctuated equilibrium is explained.

godot. seems like you're in this field...

Where are we? Can we (current science) make a living cell from a bunch of stuff that we would consider non living ? Can we craft DNA ?

Sorry if this sounds ignorant or is too much for this venue.

Here. No. Yes. Fuck you. Yes. No.

Oops, that's not quite true either. Simian Pride's link above has the scoop.

Also why white people are so adorable but tend to bark a lot and won't fuckin' leave you alone.

Because Fox urine smells like skunk spray?

So, take them on a walk like any other dog.

The big surprise is:
A) amount of time it took for such a large change to occur in the foxes (less than one human lifetime), and
B) One trait, in this case docility, is linked to many other traits like floppy ears.

Yeah... it's fascinating how prominantly the selected traits show after so few generations.

There are lots of interesting studies about how fast animals are adapting to the intense stressor of humanity - way too fast for random mutation. (But that could easily be due to dormant sequences coming in to play.)

Slightly off topic:

There was a really interesting article in Nature about hive evolution. The basic idea being that a hive must evolve as a hive and that a random mutation in a single ant or bee would not have any advantage. So what is the mechanism of hive evolution ?

Interesting to ponder and I'm fairly drunk.

Only mutations & sexual mixing of the queen's gametes (and those of her consorts) counts. The same is true of a more obvious colony of cells like yourself: mutations in skin & brain cells have no effect on the line. But selection of genes still occurs, as an unfit hive of half-sisters still kills the queen, or reduces her reproductive output.

I heard pitbulls were breed for dog fighting... and the dogs that were aggressive to humans were culled. Mostly - and I stress mostly - it's the owners responsible for violent tendencies.

But pitbulls have jaws like a car crusher and once they chomp there is no release.

I'm pretty drunk.

That sounds entirely reasonable, even if you're drunk. (on the other hand, now they are being bred specifically TO attack humans instead of bulls or bears or whatever, so I wonder if that dormant/recessive/whatever gene couldn't switch back on)

Yes.

Take a look in the mirror, buddy.

Or if you doubt that you've been bred for docility, go out in the street and start hissing and biting people, and see if you make it long enough to breed.

One can speculate on similar episodes in the geologic past. For example, during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when world temperatures spiked 6 degrees C in a few centuries, there was a single focus to natural selection of land species: the ability to dissipate heat. Smaller species, with more surface area/volume, were highly preferred. So, we get an explosion of dwarf mammalian lines in the Eocene like the ancestors to modern horses and primates.

What's important, is that evolution by a single selective factor CAN happen quite rapidly, and that it pulls a LOT of unrelated traits along for the ride.

BTW, current atmospheric carbon levels are rising at a rate only paralleled in the geologic record by the P-E extinction event. Save your baby clothes for future generations.