Ken Ham misrepresents canid taxonomy

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.”

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?

 

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

 

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

Here are their descendants:

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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Debates are not the place to take down creationists

The internets are abuzz about the big debate last night at the Creation Museum between Bill Nye and Ken Ham. Bill Nye is “the Science Guy” who I used to watch on PBS every evening. Ken Ham is a creationist.  Creationists are scum.

I need not say any more about this, but they are scum. All they ever do is speculate or misrepresent actual science.

And when a qualified person of reason decides to engage in a formal debate with one of these demagogues, it elevates the scum to a respectable level that they clearly don’t deserve.

I watched the debate this morning, and all I can say is that Ken Ham’s argument was twofold: 1. There are a few prominent scientists who are creationists and 2. It’s just a difference  of worldview and interpretation of data.

Number 1 is irrelevant to the debate. Lots of brilliant people have thought stupid things. Lots of brilliant people have accepted erroneous ideas. Konrad Lorenz was a Nazi scientist. Thomas Jefferson believed that Africans were a subhuman race.

Number 2 is not true at all, and no one in their right mind would accept it. When Ham surrenders to the “difference of worldview”  argument, then he opens up the door to all sorts of postmodernist bullshit being paraded out as science. All they have to do to defend themselves is say “We have different worldviews, and we interpret the data differently.”

That is a standard that no scientist could ever accept.

Nor should one.

As bad as Ken Ham’s arguments were, I still don’t think he lost the debate.

That’s because whenever a rationalist person tries to debate a creationist, the entire metrics of success are different for each side.

On the facts and logic, Bill Nye beat Ham hands down. Nye even taught me a thing  or two, which is really the only reason to watch one of these debates. You can learn a lot when someone really qualified uses facts and reason to debate someone who clearly does not.

But the creationists are not playing that game:  To a creationist, it matters very little if what they say can be verified empirically. The only thing that matters is belief.

And that is why they are impossible to debate.

And a formal debate is the worst place in which to engage one of these people.

That’s because in a formal debate, both sides get equal time, and it’s well-known that a lie can make it half-way across the earth while the truth is just putting on its shoes.

So a creationist can engage in what is called a “Gish Gallop” — so-named for the  creationist who developed this debating technique of using his time during the debate to let loose a volley of half-truths, misrepresentations, and absolute lies that his opponent couldn’t possibly correct. (Federal inmate Kent Hovind was a master of this technique. He should be called the Gish Marathoner!)

But Ham didn’t even try this technique– at all.

He just went back to these two themes, and if we’re going to assess the debate on those grounds, Ham lost. Severely.

However, I don’t think you can say that Billy Nye won.

Bill Nye made his argument for “the reasonable person”– should the “reasonable person” accept Ham’s creationist model?

The answer is, of course, no.

But a huge section of the American body politic– and most of the people in the audience– are not reasonable people.

Belief is all that matters. Defending this belief against all reasonable objections is considered a virtue– one of the highest virtues. That’s what Christians call “faith.”

And you simply cannot debate them.

All you can do is call them out and expose them for what they really are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Little Freddy

From Pietoro’s Historical Dog photobucket.

An English toy spaniel.

The British use a different term for this breed, but it’s the more exaggerated ancestor of the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

In the late nineteenth century and very early twentieth century, this was a very common breed among dog fanciers, especially women.

While sporting gentlemen were busy showing off bassetized sporting spaniels, their wives were show extremely brachycephalic toy spaniels.

The fashion died out, kind of like Disco and the Macarena, but the flat-faced toy spaniels still do exist.

They haven’t changed that much either.

Because spaniels are the smallest of gun dogs, they got a lot of the bizarre conformation breeding in early on.

Toy spaniels have been around for centuries, but this type of toy spaniel was something that could only be created in the mania of the British dog fancy.

And just like all bizarre fashions in dogs, this bubble burst almost as quickly as it began.

There aren’t very many of these dogs left at all.

As a breed, it’s a fascinating artifact about what can happen when fashion dictates selection pressures.

I don’t how good it is for the dogs though.

 

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Michael of Moreton in repose

The Friends of Guisachan are planning to place statue of this dog at the golden retriever ancestral estate.

Funds are being solicited now.

I received an e-mail about this project about a month ago, and I just now discovered it.

But it sounds like a very worthwhile project!

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Ruffed grouse tracks

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Bobcat track in the thaw

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Golden diver

Source for the image.

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The Delusion of Preservation

One of the most troubling delusions of parts of the dog fancy is one that is actually pretty hard to describe to someone not deeply indoctrinated into that particular value system.

I call this delusion “the delusion of preservation.”  It is a belief that if one just keeps the lineages of certain dogs pure, then one is preserving the breed as it was meant to be.

The notion that one is preserving a particular strain through selective breed is not itself a delusion. After all, all dog breeders are in some way preserving a particular type of dog through their breeding choices.

However, it’s idea that by keeping lineages forever “pure”– that is entirely descended from the foundational stock– that one is doing any favors for preserving the strain.

I’ve come across this delusion many times. It’s most common in relatively uncommon breeds, especially those that have relatively more common relatives that could be easily used as outcrosses for the purpose of genetic rescue.

Probably the most blatant example of this delusion that I’ve come across come from this website of a registry for Alapaha blueblood bulldogs. It appears as part of their FAQ:

17. With such a limited gene pool what are the health concerns for the breed?

Answer: The health concerns are like any other large breed; go with a breeder that screen for things such as hip dysplasia (OFA or PennHip), death ness (BEAR), blindness, skin disorders, entropion and such. Also get a WRITTEN guarantee/warrantee, their word is just that, their word against yours!

And last but not least, some ‘idiots’ feel that they have to go outside the breed to get different blood to sustain them but I’ve never heard of a reputable German Shepherd breeder breeding to a Collie or a Rottweiler breeder breeding to a Doberman because he/she thought they looked similar or the gene pool was too thin.

Yes, and we know that GSD’s, collies, and Dobermanns are perfect examples to emulate! Every one of those breeds has many severe genetic problems that have been almost impossible to control within their respective breeds.  Collies have collie eye anomaly, which is ubiquitous in the breed. Dobermanns, GSD’s, and Rottweilers have very high rates of cancer, and Dobermanns are known for their very high incidence of dilated cardiomyopathy.

And I’m not even talking about the severe structural problems that exist in GSD’s. Those are not the result of inbreeding, but the result of so-called reputable breeders being ignoramuses about how a dog ought to move.

In fact, these so-called reputable breeders have done such a marvelous job wrecking these pretty common breeds that one wonders why a rare breed club would follow their lead.

The answer is pretty simple:

This club wants to the world to know that this breed is legitimate.

Legitimacy for a dog breed winds up  meaning a closed registry breed.

However, this is not actually legitimacy. It is madness.

This club goes out of its way to attack a real breed preservationist organization– the Animal Research Foundation— which actually is engaged in preserving working breeds, including the Alapaha blueblood.

The truth of the matter is that although we call the AKC the American Kennel Club, it is really a foreign institution. Its entire way of functioning came from Great Britain, and before it became established here, almost no one paid any attention to closed registries.

We had good working dogs. In my part of the world the main working and hunting farm dog was the “shepherd,” a sort of generalist collie. If a farmer moved his way up to the level of a kulak, he might also keep a few scent hounds to run foxes on a Saturday night ormaybe a setter to point bobwhites. To keep the rats out of the granaries and to tree squirrels, you would have a generalist terrier, usually called a feist.  All of these animals were often crossed with each other. I have known “collies” with foxhound ancestors, and beagles with bluetick coonhound crossed in.

In Kentucky and Virginia, curs were more common than shepherds, and the ancestral cur is actually the proto-smooth collie. In Georgia and the Gulf Coast states, these curs were often mixed with other things– perhaps even the merle herding dogs from France or a bit of the old southern wolf subspecies. In those states, the cur was a bigger dog that usually was yellow with or without a black mask or some merle variant. Today, these dogs have been split into breeds which are impossible for me to keep up with.

This merle cur dog was often bred to another generalist working dog that was common in this part of the South. This is the farm bulldog, a creature that likely derives from the ancestral stock that gave us both English mastiffs and bulldogs. This dog was used to guard the estate and manage often very wild livestock in much the same way the curs were used.

And even now, it’s a very common practice to breed merle curs to bulldogs for hunting purposes.

And that is the most likely origin of the Alapaha blueblood. It’s a bulldog/merle cur cross.

Of course, saying this is an absolute heresy because many dog fanciers who own this sort of dog are under the delusion that these dogs derive from Spanish war mastiffs, which is nothing more than a flight of fancy. Spanish colonization in this part of the world was intensive, but it was never as extensive as that of England and later the British Empire. There might be a tiny bit of Spanish blood in these dogs, but the Spanish were not coming over in vast waves to settle the South. People from the British Isles clearly were, though, and they came decades after the Spanish were forced back down into Florida.

Also, I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but this kind of dog cannot live on its own in the wild in a subtropical climate. There have never been any wild bulldogs or mastiffs that have evolved anywhere in the world, much less a subtropical climate where the dog simply couldn’t keep itself cool or free of parasites. So the chances of Spanish bulldogs surviving on their own in the wild in the decades between when the Spanish were driven out and the vast waves of Anglo settlement began in the South are very, very low. It’s a romantic delusion if there ever was one.

So this kind of dog wasn’t living in the South for hundreds of years as a closed registry breed.

It was just a regional variant of the bulldog/cur– one that had a lot more bulldog than cur blood.

And the ARF is allowing outcrosses to other farm bulldogs into their recognized strains of Alapaha blueblood, which is, of course, why they are being so viciously attacked in the FAQ.

The ARF is actually engaging in true preservation breeding. It is keeping the genetic diversity of the strain alive. It knows you cannot preserve any biological entity, be it a rare domestic dog breed or an endangered species, if you simply ignore the genetic diversity of the breeding population.

This is why the dog fancy continues to fail dogs.

And the desire to emulate this failure in rare or working breeds is perhaps the most baffling aspect I’ve seen.

This delusion of preservation is something that must be openly challenged. Otherwise, nothing will be preserved at all.

Genes will be lost.

And dogs will continue to suffer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hunter with retriever by Frank W. Benson (1926)

It’s hard to tell what breed of retriever this is, but I have my suspicions.

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Did Ben Franklin import a closed registry Gordon setter? Another delusion of the closed registry cult

A tricolored retrieving setter, perhaps very similar to the type Benjamin Franklin imported.

On Facebook, a friend of mine posted this bizarre rant from a purebred dog breeder:

“I DON”T call freedom a choice to do whatever!!!!!!… Don’t get confused….. Ben Franklin worked for freedom— but he worked at having a purebred Gordon setter brought from England and bred them.. to preserve something special. the Freedom was to have a choice to own a dog so let’s get this Freedom of Choice thing straight… where did you all go to school???? what happened to parents teaching their children the real meaning of this slogan??? .. not to breed mutts/designer dogs on a whim and to see how much money you might get …Dogs were bred for a purpose for a certain breed to have that characteristic…. Ben and all the rest of us spent millions of dollars to insure something true and honest…. how dare you or anyone else decide to take our Freedom of choice away from US..it is not ok to breed this way.. it shows lack of purpose, lack of loyalty.. lake of knowledge and lack of you wanting to spend money to support a breed to insure it’s Freedom to exist…. you might as well say we have the freedom to poop on the street…or anything else we choose to have the freedom we feel like doing…..”

Well, freedom to choose means the freedom to do whatever. I don’t know how you can twist the meaning of the words to mean to change the meaning to fit whatever totalitarian delusions that one might have. It’s like the people who tell you they are for freedom, but at the same time, they tell you that this country is based upon Christian values.

Those two things do not compute!

As I’ve noted before, the dogs are one of the many ersatz religions that no exists in this post-Christian culture in which we now live. I am fine with the decline of organized religion, but what has replaced it is not a culture of reason.

What has replaced it is many irrational, tribal cults which allow people with totalitarian impulses to act out their pathologies on others. It’s one reason I’m not a joiner. I love dogs, but I’m very dismayed and continually disappointed by dog people.

So in that crazy rant we have several claims. We have the hilariously irony-deficient claim to be a champion of freedom while telling others what to do, and we have a claim from history that could at best be called a delusion. And at its very worst, we would have to call it an utter misrepresentation of the history.

The claim is that founding father Benjamin Franklin imported a Gordon setter from England, and the implication is that he imported a closed registry setter that comes in only black and tan.

Of course, that type of dog didn’t exist when Ben Franklin was alive!

The Gordon setter, which should be called the Scottish setter, is actually derived from the old crouching setter of Britain, a dog that was the quintessential British fowling dog that  would crouch before game birds hidden the brush or corn. A hawk would be flown over the birds to keep them from flying and a net would be thrown over the crouching dog and the hunkered birds.

This type of dog became very popular in British Isles during the early modern period, and it was also sent to the colonies in North America in droves. In America, we developed this setter dog into a sort of HPR, which we would use to point grouse, retrieve ducks from cold water, and track wounded deer.

In Britain, there were many, many different strains of setter, of which only a handful remain. The Dukes of Gordon did breed a type of setter in Scotland, but it is laughable to assume that this was a closed registry breed.  All records of the setters of Gordon kennels I’ve read from that time period talk about the dogs being tricolored, black, white, and tanned like a Dobermann.

And it was well-known that the in the eighteenth century, the 4th Duke of Gordon was always breeding his stock to those of other nobles.

In his excellent Gundogs: Their Past, Their Performance and Their Prospects (2013), Col. David Hancock mentions that this fourth Duke of Gordon coveted the blood of Thomas Coke’s setters, and it was Coke’s setters that were the foundational stock for his particular strain. I have seen no evidence that Coke’s setters were anything other than the more typical predominantly white setters that were always common in England. (Coke’s estate was in Norfolk, nowhere near Scotland).

It is also well-known that Gordon setters have a bit of collie blood, which is always mentioned in all the historical texts of the breed, but no one seems to acknowledge what this means. It means that the Gordon setter as a working gun dog didn’t become a gun dog through being a closed registry breed.

It became a great gun dog through the continuous desire to innovate. This desire to experiment and innovate is what made British Empire the world’s leader in agricultural improvement.

As soon as closed registries were established, this ability to innovate and experiment was taken away.

And we all know that Benjamin Franklin was among the leading intellectuals of the world at the time. He was clearly a man of science and reason, and if he could read and understand the modern concepts of population genetics, he would be among the foremost opponents of this closed registry system.

He imported a British setter because they were great gun dogs. They became great gun dogs because the British were willing to innovate and experiment with bloodlines.

It is that freedom that should be celebrated and encouraged in the world of dogs, but unfortunately, it goes against all the totalitarian impulses that exist in the dog world that has since developed.

For the sake of the dogs, dog breeders should be reading up on the science and understanding the real history of their dogs.

They shouldn’t be wasting their time with pointless myths that are ultimately harmful to the animals they claim to love.

But that means that some grand poobah of yore was wrong somewhere and that modern breed mandarins might have to be humble and accept that they cannot control everything that goes on with their breed.

The first idea that must be trashed is that closed registries and blood purity for blood purity’s sake are ultimately good values. Unfortunately, that is the basic religious tenet of the modern dog fancy, and  it is almost impossible to have a rational discussion with people who adhere to such poppycock.

It is this religious belief that is causing so much misery in the world of dogs– higher incidence of inherited diseases and winnowed away gene pools are not good things.

And it is also stymieing innovation.

We could be producing better working dogs for a variety of tasks if only it were acceptable to cross strains. Imagine West Siberian laikas that natural retrieve because of a golden retriever that was crossed in a few generations before. Imagine a cocker spaniel-sized Labrador that easily fits in a canoe that got its small size from a simple outcross to a small working spaniel.

It is this kind of freedom in the world of dogs that we should all be fighting for.

But unfortunately, too many “freedom lovers” in the world of dogs really don’t want it.

It crosses their fundamentalist beliefs, and they will having nothing of it.

But like all bullies, they ought to be put in their place. Totalitarians have no use fighting for freedom.

Freedom means freedom to do as one would like, and don’t be fooled by the demagogues who apparently can’t understand that simple fact.

 

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