Ironic, because a too-small heart with additional pressure provided elsewhere is just the kind of jury-rigged system evolution would come up with.
A creator-god who could design by fiat would have just installed a bigger heart.
My thought too - horses have been bred to a bigger size and level of exertion than they were before humans got hold of them. As for the frog being essential to help the heart - Horses stand still for a long time, and don’t keel over. the frog may be effective in helping return some blood to the heart much faster, and is probably quite useful when the horse is in motion to help deliver extra blood through the legs, but the heart seems to work fine when the horse stands motionless. This could be attributable to a system that evolves as necessary as the size and circulation requirements of a horse increased.
From what Wikipedia says, it appears this is a decent design; it can be attributed, it seems, to whomever or to whatever process produced the result. I don’t see that an advocate of creationism or evolution could claim it as a plus or minus in their argument. it just is.
I’m not sure why you’re separating human breeding from evolution.
Human breeding is exactly evolution in action: some individuals reproduce more than others, and which individuals do that is based on at least partly inherited and variable characteristics, so the composition of the group changes over generations. Just because human decisions form a very big part of the environment doesn’t mean the mechanism is any different.
Slight bump.
I found this article today about the horse toe evolution that ties it to the creation argument. Just good to know the idea is out there.
Do horses hate Whos?
You can ride a horse to death not because of its physiology but its temperament. Mules partake of the donkey side of their family tree to the extent that rather than exert themselves past the point of no return they will just refuse to go any more. I don’t know about original type horses (they were pony sized) but we have selected horses for thousands of years to want to go until we let them stop.
All this stuff about frogs and hearts is really weird new news to me.
My former boss (not really a creationist, but oddly, often made creationist arguments) once told me that evolution was false because giraffes are totally unfit for survival.
Same goes for bananas. (Yes, I’m looking at YOU, Kirk Cameron!)
We do have a long history of drawing distinctions between what humans do and what nature does.
Of course, you’re completely correct, and this line of thinking causes a lot of problems (if you rule out husbandry and domestication you also implicitly rule out symbiotic organisms in a fashion). Still, I can see what’s meant by “evolution didn’t cause it”, just like we might blame a person rather than “chemistry” for some catastrophe involving dynamite.