If you cut off the tails of 100 generations of 100 lines of the same breed of dog, wouldn't they eventually start evolving shorter tails? I thought that was one of the basic tenets of evolutionary science -- that the environment can make us change over time. Like back when we were apes, we started standing upright to see over the tall grass, and it stuck.

I'm really not joking.

No, the tail size is written in the DNA. But if you neutered the dogs with long tails, and only bred the short-tailed ones, after a few generations, they would all have short tails. If you tried to breed them for shorter and shorter tails, eventually they would have no tail.

All dogs are the same species -- even the chihuahua and the great dane. They've simply been bred for specific purposes for a few hundred years. But if the dane has sex with the huahua, they will have a litter of dogs.

yeaaaaah, but then we'd all have to look at their assholes all the time, and what fun would that be? I mean really.

Don't you have cats at the Lumberjinx homestead?

* * *

As long as the dane is the female. Otherwise, there may be some rupturing issues.

No matter how many generations of women get their ears pierced, they won't be born with the holes. For evolution to happen, the change has to be in the DNA, and DNA isn't affected by injuries (radiation excepted, not that radiation effects are predictable). Evolution happens if a dog happens to have a short tail, and that somehow lets it have more babies. The next generation of dogs would then have a slightly larger percentage of short-tail dogs in its population, who would have a few more babies than average, further increasing the percentage of short-tail dogs in the next generation population. Eventually, they are the vast majority, and the species has evolved.

Here's a thought experiment relating to your example - Let's assume a predator that loves dog tail. If it sees a pack of dogs, it tries to bite off a tail. If it succeeds, that dog has a chance of getting an infection and dieing. Therefore, dogs with long tails attract more attacks, and have a correspondingly high death rate. Short tails are hard to get a hold on, so they fare better, and a mutant dog with no tail will escape unscathed.

But in a clinical trial, if you snip off the tails of some dogs, and then make sure each one survives the procedure and has the same number of babies, those babies will have roughly the same range of tail sizes as the parent generation, no matter how many generations you continue the experiment for.

Like this?

Yeah, but a great dane is considerably more than twice the size of a chihuahua, and dogs have multiple births as a general rule...

Via Boingboing. We'll miss you, tiny freakish kitten!

...And someday, thousands of years from now, anthropologists will assume that as a society we worshipped a mythical cyclops cat, whose all-seeing eye governed our daily lives.

you mean we don't?

D'OH!

Of course we do!

Only on IotD, Greek and Bio-lessons over a cat
 

And who modded IotD down on the educational scores. I've learned more useless greek info (unless there are hot greek girls reading this) and bio / genetics in the last few moments than I picked up in school.

Maybe you could offer the BS in IotD as a degree program.

Well, lt that be a lesson to you. :smashfrea

I can clearly see that it's fake. Beside, kittens that young don't even have their eyes open, simple fact. The originator of the hoax should be turned into a cyclops.