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Selection

'Which characteristics would we like to breed in?'
I found this question, on Selective Breeding, in a Junior High School text book beside two comparative illustrations: a wild pig and a domestic pig. The wild pig was slim, rough and savage looking. The domestic pig was fat, smooth and calm.

My concern is that the words 'breed in' can result in a misunderstanding. It could be, that a student may take from this, that something can be added from outside. In reality, all possibilities for pig-being have existed from the day that pigs were created. The original wild pigs had all of the characteristics found in domestic pigs today. The first wild dogs had in their dog kind, all of the information to form domestic dogs. It is not possible, with selective breeding, to bring properties in which do not already exist in that particular animal kind.

Having, perhaps, misunderstood selective breeding, the student will then be more likely to accept that Natural Selection can 'add in.' It can't! There is no real difference between Selective Breeding and Natural Selection except that with Natural Selection it is environmental factors which are responsible for the 'selection.'

By the way, it is surprising that Darwin did not seem to understand this obvious fact. The truth is that we have never found anything which can be responsible for the addition of information to the gene pool: mutation too can only subtract. At present, no mechanism which could result in the development of single cell to, say, human being, has ever been discovered. The whole research effort, in Evolutionary Biology, over the last almost two hundred years, has taken us down a blind alley.

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