The problem materialists have is they attempt to define animals, such as dogs, by the physical....but what ultimately is responsible for the creation of a kind (such as the dog kind) is not anything that can be found in the physical....there is no "dog gene" or "dog genes." therefore...there is nothing for which to mutate to turn a dog into anything else. The mind of a dog is ultimately what must be altered. To change a dog into a non-dog would require the change of a non-phyiscal dog mind into a non-dog mind.
Are we talking about a spirit dog here, and is this a native american religious view?
Please explain further, then we can get on to whether or not genetics is involved.
quote:The Tame Silver Fox is the result of nearly 50 years of experiments in the Soviet Union and Russia to domesticate the silver morph of the Red Fox. Notably, the new foxes not only become more tame, but more dog-like as well: they lost their distinctive musky "fox smell", became more friendly with humans, put their ears down (like dogs), wagged their tails when happy and began to vocalize and bark like domesticated dogs. The breeding project was set up by the Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev.
Belyaev believed that the key factor selected for domestication of dogs was not size or reproduction, but behaviour; specifically amenability to domestication, or tameability. More than any other quality, Belyaev believed, tameability must have determined how well an animal would adapt to life among humans. Because behavior is rooted in biology, selecting for tameness and against aggression means selecting for physiological changes in the systems that govern the body's hormones and neurochemicals.
Belyaev decided to test his theory by domesticating foxes; in particular the Russian Silver Fox. He placed a population of them in the same process of domestication, and he decided to submit this population to a strong selection pressure for inherent tameness.
The result is that Russian scientists now have a number of tame foxes which are fundamentally different in temperament and behavior from their wild forebears. Some important changes in physiology and morphology are now visible, such as mottled or spotted colored fur. Many scientists believe that these changes related to selecting for tameness are caused by lower adrenaline production in the new breed, which causes these physiological changes in a very small number of generations, thus allowing for these new genetic offshoots not present in the original species.
quote:A rigorous testing system for assessment of behavioral phenotypes, has been established at ICG to enable selection of foxes for behavior (Trut 1980, 1999; Vasilieva and Trut, 1990). Experiments undertaken in the 1970s included experimental cross-breeding of tame and aggressive animals, cross-fostering of newborn pups and transplantation of embryos, and demonstrated the genetic basis of the tame and aggressive phenotypes (Trut, 1980, 2001). New experimental pedigrees have been developed more recently (2001-2004) by crossbreeding tame to aggressive foxes, and then backcrossing F1 animals to tame parents. Clear resegregation of the tame behavioral phenotype in the informative generations was observed (Kukekova et al. In press).
(color for emPHAsis)
oops?
Did the fox spirit\mind change? Or did the result occur due to changes in the hereditary (genetic) traits in the population from generation to generation?