Atheism is unreasonable

[The Grand Nudger]

So wolves gave rise to dogs...but a wolf is not a dog??? They are clearly the same kind of animal!!!

A dog is a subspecies of wolf (obviously I'm assuming you're talking about domestic dogs in all of this). That's why dogs don't give birth to wolves, understand? They would only be the same "kind" if kind meant genus or family - which it doesn't, as you've made very clear.

I don't know why they can no longer produce...maybe so much genetic information was lost over time...the same thing with the cheetah..but that isn't the same thing as the archae (reptile to bird) changes that you people claim to have happened in the past.

In most cases it's an issue of chromosome pairing (as I mentioned). Amusingly, if "lost information" were the culprit it would be even more difficult to explain, as the wolves are -newer- than those members of their family with -fewer- chromosomes. Seems that wolves didn't lose anything, they gained, relative to members of their family with which they can no longer breed. African wild dogs, which aren't wild dogs at all..have precisely the same number of chromosomes as wolves...so nothing was lost on that count (amusingly, we haven't seen any hybrids between AWD and Wolves or their genus - despite ample opportunity, maybe they're biding their time?)

But, going by your conclusions "kind" must be family (since dogs, foxes, and african wild dogs are all Canids). How about humans, chimps, orangutans, and gorillas- all the same "kind"?

What I'd like to know is based on all of the diversity we see in living organisms, how the hell does that suggest we all share a common ancestor??

I very rarely leave my own comments quoted in a reply...but here I had to. I'll answer your question, of course....but I'm a little disappointed that you wouldn't apply the rules I've been assembling based upon your own conclusions....and not just that...that you would refuse to even acknowledge what had been said.....by you. I thought we were doing good. You proved me wrong a little ways back already, I was sure that "kind" was genus as of this morning. I've been corrected since.

I'm just going to stuff my disappointment deep down and continue. The notion that we all share a common ancestor -isn't- based upon the diversity that we see. So that's pretty much a non-question. The notion that we all share a common ancestor was based on the opposite of diversity, the vast homogeneity we see across very "distant" creatures (by any measure). First, morphologically - as this was pretty much as deep as we could investigate the issue, but then, genetically (as we gained access to more powerful instrumentation). It's still possible that life has multiple ancestors, and that they all just happened to fall into the same structural and genetic patterns, and that they all did so in an orderly manner (no one line "jumping ahead" of the other) such as to create a situation in which we simply couldn;t tell the difference. But that;s an extraneous assumption, it's not really required, it offers no additional explanatory power - because even if there were multiple ancestral points...they all homogenized to the point of being indistinguishable, and all by the same means in the same period of time.