Imagine this cute guy, a miniature dachshund, surviving in the wild:

Not going to happen. Not even a week.

German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig (Max Planck Institutes) means no disrespect to canines when he calls their evolution a matter of degeneration. On the contrary, like me and millions of other people, he is a dog lover. Nevertheless, the development of dog breeds has been accomplished by the opposite of what Darwinism needs to show: "no increase in information but rather a decrease or loss of function on the genetic and anatomical levels" compared to the dogs’ ancestor, the gray wolf.

I wanted to echo ENV’s recommendation in our current cover story that you listen to Casey Luskin’s two-part podcast interview with Dr. Lönnig (here and here). Besides having a wonderful accent, particularly enjoyable in the discussions of Chihuahuas and dachshunds, Dr. Lönnig blows away a cherished icon of Darwinism, the one that brandishes dog breeding as a proof of macroevolution. (See, for example, pp. 125-127 in Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True.)

ENV has reviewed Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig’s book Our Domestic Dog: A Shrew in Wolf’s Clothing?, which shows in detail that dogs have been sculpted by human beings over the centuries not by adding function but by taking it away. Dependent on people and plagued by health issues, dogs tell us nothing about how novel function, inseparable from survival value, could arise in biology without intelligent direction from outside. (The reference to a shrew comes from the idea that all mammals are related through our common ancestry, traced back to a shrew-like creature that, so they say now, slept through the catastrophic extinction of the dinosaurs.)

The only regrettable thing about Lönnig’s book is that it’s currently available only in German. That’s why the interview with Casey, estimably thorough, lucid, and informative, is so useful. It almost substitutes for reading the book. Don’t miss it.

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Image source: Timothy Wildey /Flickr.