Question

In a short essay (100-150 words), answer the following questions based on this statement:

Dogs evolved from eurasian grey wolves beginning about 15,000 years ago. You would like to reverse the process and evolve a poodle into a wolf (you may NOT breed it with currently living wolves, you may only breed dogs together).

     a) Describe how you would use selective breeding to start with a blue ribbon award-winning poodle and selectively breed it over many 100's of generations into a savage wolf. Remember, you may not cross a dog with a wolf, they are different species. You may only cross dogs with dogs.

     b) When you successfully raise a wolf from those first poodles, would you consider this evolution? Explain your answer.

Answer 1

a. We will select two blue award winning poodle and allow them to breed . This will produce a poodle which will carry genes of two genetically superior poodles. Then we allow to interbreed F1 poodles and select the offspring which showed more aggressiveness like that of a wolf. In this way we will interbreed poodles in every generation by selecting the offspring which have quality more like that of a wolf. Accumulation of desired characters in future generation poodle, we will move towards the creation of a wolf from poodles. By this artificial selection and breeding preference,we might be able to create a wolf from poodles.

b. We will not called it evolution because it has not occured naturally by the nature. It is like a designer baby where human intervention has created the wolf from poodles. Nature has not selected or favoured this creation and it is also not happening in natural populations of poodles. So we should not consider this as evolution.