Inbreeding VS Evolution

What evidence do you have that dogs have undergone no mutation in the course of their selective breeding? It seems much more likely that a number of breeds will have a number of very specific mutations which confer their specific breed traits.Also the artificial selection used to create new breeds is considerably more extreme than natural selection would be in many environments.Specie is a type of money, the singular of species is species.

I think I phrased that badly, I don't think that the original breeding population from which all dogs have been bred were genetically homogeneous to start off with. I am sure there was already a pool of variant alleles, but those alleles themselves would be the product of mutation, and I don't believe that there has been no mutation in canine breeding stock since then.

Inbreeding isn't a mechanism to generate new variation. Inbreeding can exaggerate already existing variation by producing populations with homozygosity for particular alleles, inbreeding is especially important in maintaining a phenotype for which the allele is reccessive. The point is not that dogs in general have been inbred which has lead to an increase in variation, it is that inbreeding of specific populations has lead to a marked decrease in variation in those populations.Dogs are particularly diverse because artificial selection can be directed, in the way natural selection is not, and can bring to bear selective pressures much higher than natural selection might normally on very modest changes in phenotype.Inbreeding isn't the cause of the mutations it simply increases the frequency of the mutation in the population, in the wild this effect would be due to more individuals posessing a beneficial mutation surving and reproducing and a subsequently higher representation of that particular allele in the following generations. Obviously the smaller and more inbred a population the quicker these beneficial alleles are likely to fixate, but also in a small inbred population there are problems with deleterious recessives and genetic drift leading to random fixation of alleles.

It would depend very much on the variation in the gene pool of your initial breeding population. There is some evidence from conservationists in Africa that elephants with reduced or no tusks are becoming more frequent but I'm not sure if this is much better than mere anecdotal evidence, it has certainly only had limited coverage in the general scientific literature. I think that given the time and a suitable size and variety in the initial breeding population you could produce a dramatic morphological range in elephants.Dogs are not the only example of extensive artificial selection. Cats. certain species of bird and of course a wide variety of plants both for food and for aesthetic reasons and a number of domesticated farm animals have been subjected to intensive artififial selection. Admittedly not all of them show as wide a range as the dog.Homozygosity means having the same allele, an organism displaying the phenotype for a recessive trait will normally be homozygous for that trait. In the context of a population I was proposing a population all of which had the same allele for a trait.

Your hypothetical scenario seems considerably different from normal creationist approaches. For a start you would require a large initial breeding population, which certainly isn't consistent with a literal interpretation of the bible.If your creationism is broad enough to encompass such radical deviations then you might as well go straight on to asking how we can be sure God didn't just create the whole universe yesterday.

But I thought that the problematical point was supposed to be that the dogs all show this variation within one interfertile species, whereas the primates you covered represent different species.