quote:
I think you're going to need to explain this a little better.
Are you saying that the ability of a diverse assemblage of dog varieties to interbreed can somehow be used as support for Faith's idea that all that genetic diversity was present in the original gene pool of dogs/wolves?
Ya, I'm not very good at explaining things sometimes.
For Faith's model to function, there needs to be a starting pool of alleles to work off of that would generate the variety of phenotypes we observe. If there is not a pool of alleles to work off of, or modification of this pool cannot generate significant variation, then the death knell of the theory is sounded.
The point dogs started getting domesticated(a point which would occur in any model, creationist or evolutionist) is a good starting point for looking for evidence that such a pool potentially existed. According to wikipedia, man began domesticating dogs about 30k-7k years ago. This is not a significant amount of time for truly random mutations to build up to significant quantities(correct me if I'm wrong), and thus it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the variation that is observed is due to pre-existing alleles(or alleles that are generated by non-random mutations, which are probably only in specific places.).
Thus, at the point of domestication, there existed a large pool of alleles. Given the vast range of dog breeds that can be generated from this original pool(which, if they occured in the wild, many would probably be termed different species), it is conceivable for a pool of alleles to cause significant speciation without the aid of random mutations. This part of the model had been challenged by Percy, partly based on the nebulous term 'species.'
Her model for speciation has thus not experienced any significant challenges yet. 'Cept the flood reduction bit to effectively 4 alleles per gene, but that's a different issue. It doesn't have really any direct links to the validity of this model.