Excerpts from Dawkins' upcoming book, "The Greatest Show on Earth"

[laconicsax]

I posted a link to an excerpt from chapter 1 in R/T because it deals with creationism and evolution-denial http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x216443

Excerpt from chapter 2:

The way in which wolves adapted to the environment to turn into dogs reveals another insight into evolution

We can turn to the example of dogs for some important lessons about natural selection. All breeds of dogs are domesticated wolves: not jackals, not coyotes and not foxes. But I need to qualify this in the light of a fascinating theory of the evolution of the dog, which has been most clearly articulated by the American zoologist Raymond Coppinger. The idea is that the evolution of the dog was not just a matter of artificial selection. It was at least as much a case of wolves adapting to the ways of Man by natural selection. Much of the initial domestication of the dog was selfdomestication, mediated by natural, not artificial, selection. Long before we got our hands on the chisels in the artificial selection toolbox, natural selection had already sculpted wolves into self-domesticated “village dogs’ without any human intervention.

Only later did humans adopt these village dogs and transmogrify them, separately and comprehensively, into the rainbow spectrum of breeds that today grace (if grace is the word) Crufts and similar pageants of canine achievement and beauty (if beauty is the word).

Coppinger points out that when domestic animals break free and go feral for many generations, they usually revert to something close to their wild ancestor. We might expect feral dogs, therefore, to become rather wolf-like. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, dogs left to go feral seem to become the ubiquitous “village dogs” — “pye-dogs” — that hang around human settlements all over the Third World. This encourages Coppinger’s belief that the dogs on which human breeders finally went to work were wolves no longer. They had already changed themselves into dogs: village dogs, pye-dogs, perhaps dingos.

...

Something like this evolutionary shortening of the flight distance was, in Coppinger’s view, the first step in the domestication of the dog, and it was achieved by natural selection, not artificial selection. Decreasing flight distance is a behavioural measure of what might be called increasing tameness. At this stage in the process, humans were not deliberately choosing the tamest individuals for breeding. At this early stage, the only interactions between humans and these incipient dogs were hostile. If wolves were becoming domesticated it was by self-domestication, not deliberate domestication by people. Deliberate domestication came later.

More at link

[trotsky]

1. Very interesting.

Dawkins is a very talented writer. I really like how he collects and puts forth ideas.

[Posteritatis]

2. Selfish Gene and Ancestor's Tale will never leave my bookshelves

I'm not as much of a fan of some of his other works written around the time of either - I enjoy his explanation of evolution more than his polemicizing about atheism, and I'm sort of in that particular choir anyway - but those two books got me to understand evolution and evolutionary history a hell of a lot more than I had before I looked at them.