Origin of the Dalmatians by Intelligent Design

Moshe Dayan is a bit of an outcast, not show quality because he has a very large ring around his left eye. Otherwise Moshe is a typical Dalmatian with a lot of spots and a great smile.

Aside from the spots and the smile, Moshe is about 99.9% just a dog. Taken to a dog park, he chooses his friends without regard to race, religion, sexual preference, or breed. In fact, I have seen no evidence that Moshe is even interested in another dog's spots.

This lack of interest in one's breed seems to me to be very different from human behavior. Despite the best efforts of our most liberal citizens, integration only goes so far. For example, most students aggregate with others of their own ethnic or raciaol group. How comes it that Dalmatian's are so much more enlightened than we are? I have a theory.

Modern, rational, loquacious hominids, are 60 to 100 thousand years old. Skeletons indistinguishable from modern human, however, are considerably older than a hundred thousand years. Around 60,000 BCE something happened amongst our ancestors. They got a lot better at making tools, their religions became much more complex, and they discovered art. Paleontologists believe that some thing was the discovery of speech. This discovery probably involved a genetic event because the genetic data tell us that we modern, speaking humans are descended from a very small number of people who existed at that time
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The paleontologists, however, tell us that dogs already existed alongside our hominid ancestors for many hundreds of thousands of years before the "masters" began talking. Early hominids and dogs were both scavengers, living off the table scraps left by more effective carnivores such as lions. I wonder if the modern image of a lion as a brave animal reaches back to some dim memory of our subservient role, cleaning the bones left after the lions' feat. The famous paleontologist Richard Leakey, says that after the canines and the hominids retired from a full day of the scavenging, canine and hominid retired to case where they slept together. It is even imaginable that protohumans and dogs somehow helped each other in the hunt. Leakey went so far as to suggest that hominids and canines are "co-species."

If Leakey is right, man and dog were shaped together by evolution. Natuarl selection may have created our affection for each other. But something happened to canine evolution about 10,000 years ago .. dogs developed into hundreds of different breeds. Despite thos diversity, Moshe simply doesn't care about breed. How did this happen?

Perhaps the answer comes from intelligent design. My theory depends on understanding the meaning of "species." Proponents of intelligent design make a great deal of the concept of "species". The claim is the "species" have not been observed to develop spontaneously or in laboratory studies of evolution. This argument may reflect a lack of understanding of the basic terminology of biology. Biologists define "species" as being sexually incompatible. Speciation, that is sexual incompatibility between otherwise similar animals, can occur on the basis of very small changes in an animals physical or even behavioral traits. For example, distinct species of crabs are found on the east versus the west coast of Australia. The only difference between the two species is in a mating dance done with the front claws. Remove the claws and love unfolds. So, a subtle change occurring because of random mutations WITH NO EFFECT ON SURVIVAL has created two species. It is easy to see how dog breeder might create two species of dogs. I suspect that Chihuahua and Great Dane are already sexually incompatible, at least without resource to artificial insemination and even then it is hard to imagine a Chihuahua dam giving birth to a Great Dane pup.

So it appears that humans, for our own amusement were able to intelligently design dog "breeds", while our own "races" arose by random changes as our Chinese, French, Aussie, and Bantu ancestors migrated away from the ancestral caves? As we migrates, our dogs went with us and we decided to create different breeds. We became the force for intelligent design. Unfortunately, human intelligence is limited and Dalmatians, in addition to spots, have inherited gout. Amazingly, the American Kennel Club Dalmatian Club will not permit breeders to eliminate the gout gene, even though the gene is now identified. The dog breeders want to keep the breed, their intelligent creation, "pure." Since breed is a human creation, dogs have no reason to recognize it.

There's a lesson in all this for contemporary concepts of race. Extremists on the liberal side argue that there is no such thing as race because all humans share a very similar genome. That assertion, while appealing to egalitarians, sidesteps the obvious issue that a very large portion of our species can be a separated even on the basis of visual inspection into the races. Thus race and breed are very similar except that one is a result of Darwin's choices one the other as a result of intelligent design. I also suggest that in humans, because we speak different languages, breeding is at least weakly coupled to a desire to identify with people who "sound and look like us." Thus, the rather limited physical differences between the races arose partly because some ancestral spin-off from the original tribe, decided that a family group would emigrate to a new home. Once that happened, the desire to breed with similar folks combined with the geographic barriers led to racial distinctions. In contrast physical differences between dogs, resulting from intelligent design, are far more stringent but dogs are all culturally alike.

Every dog pound is evidence that dogs, unlike humans, do not have any genetic tendency to racism. Does that prove the canine designer is more intelligent than the human designer?