3 ms·

200 years is a decent chunk of time from an evolutionary standpoint. We feel it's short because of how long our history has been. But within 200 years you can m

• maxerickson 9y ago
  Dogs are fertile at 1 or 2 years of age. You can do an awful lot more in 100-150 generations than you can in 10-15 generations (probably more like 6-8. Checking my family tree, many of my great-great grandparents were born ~1850, so for me personally, 5 or 6 generations). In any case, we have to go back to the question that the GP asked, that dogs are malleable doesn't help us. Does reduced child mortality really cause more mutations to accumulate?
• evolve2017 9y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding my point, but maybe I shouldn't have taken vertebrates as an example; we can of course imagine some island where massive selection pressures lead to speciation. I would be interested if you have such an example. However, dog breeds are not species and, given their non-random mating, don't really tell us much about whether 200 years is long in vertebrate evolutionary time. As far as humans go, I will grant that allele frequencies may have changed if you pick an isolated subpopulation of humans (say, everyone in Greenland) but even that seems extremely unlikely. As an aside, there are researchers who are using the caste system in India as a way to explore genetic architectures within a civilization. As these castes have existed for considerably longer than the period we're discussing, meaningful allele frequency changes may arise.