Saturday, September 10, 2016

The Temptation to Comment on 9/11 but How About Evolution Instead

The 9/11 hypocrisy and the temptation exist but the article will not and primarily because both aspects are so obvious people should know already.  Anyone who doesn't know already is probably in the category of a cretin Yevette encountered earlier who said 'the enemies are Communism and feminism.'  My suggestion to Yevette was to tell the cretin she or it never made the cut in the evolution of monkeys to humans so throw her a banana and move along with your busy day.

(Ed:  humans didn't evolve from monkeys!)

Now I know you don't want to play this and I know you know I can do it.


How about we go with a much more generic aspect of evolution since Cat and I were talking a little yesterday about what makes a dog.  The question isn't so much what makes a dog but rather the opposite since one dog fits all.  Mystery Lady's Joy and Cadillac Man's Frosty have exactly the same genes as a Great Dane although picking the smaller varieties of dogs was a good choice for their circumstances.  A Great Dane is said to be dumber than a slice of Velveeta Cheese and a dog that dumb with bowel movements the size of Mount Everest may not be the best choice for a house pet.

But all have the same dog genes, buddy.

Fundamental to any aspect of this is you don't breed anything into an animal but rather you select only from that which is already there, much of which the breeder may not be immediately able to see but emerges as the breeding program progresses.


Cat was talking of the specialized high-end breeding which results in an Akita, a Doberman or a Saint Bernard.  That type of selective breeding is the same father-daughter breeding relationship used for thoroughbred horses or any breeding program of that nature.  The father-daughter aspect sounds abhorrent from a cultural standpoint but that's one of the best techniques for reinforcing desirable traits in the progeny.  It's also a peach of a way of bringing up lethal recessives which kill the progeny and hence the big bucks for race horses, pedigreed dogs, etc.


For our aspect of the game, we don't care about selective breeding but rather just what are all the components of 'dogness' since a dog can be a ten+ kilo Shih Tzu or or over a hundred kilos in a Great Dane but it's still a dog.  The tremendous variety is inside the genome for all dogs but different aspects of it are expressed for the various varieties.


If you have jumped ahead to why all these types of 'dogness' existed in dogs in the first place then good on you.  Maybe we can take some sense from mammals being originally tiny creatures which evolved into bigger ones so we can see some logic for the variability in size.  How about the varieties in temperament, however.  Unless a pitbull is trained by an expert you will probably not trust it anywhere near you and with good reason.  Other dogs have much more biddable dispositions and we didn't breed that 'into' the dogs but rather we discovered how to encourage those traits which already existed.  So why does the dog have 'nice dog' genes right beside 'asshole dog' genes?

Regulars already know I'm not going to answer this because questions are so much more entertaining when we don't have answers.


If you're wondering what genes are in the human genome which are no longer or rarely expressed then welcome to the Twilight Zone because that gives all kinds of foundation for getting kozmik.  When people mention psionic powers, this isn't something being introduced to the human genome; they were already there if they exist at all.  Take it away, Zenna Henderson.

Note:  she wrote "The People:  No Different Flesh" and it's a marvelous part of series of stories regarding some extraordinarily gentle people who have psionic powers of various kinds.  Naturally, they're persecuted because of it.

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