The English Bob, The Australian Stumpy Tail Cattle dog and the manx cat are at least three breeds that are genetically tailless. I’m sure that if you do a web search or post a GQ you’ll find many more. So you think these are separate species or subspecies. No one else on earth does to the best of my knowledge. Of course if you can provide a reference to the contrary I’ll concede the original point about species never loosing anything. Alternatively following this nonsense through an albino human being, having lost the genetic ability to produce melanin, becomes a subspecies of human.
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Actually I thought my last post made it quite clear that ‘use it or lose it’ can and does happen for populations. In fact I can’t actually think of any examples of it applying to individuals except perhaps termite wings or muscle atrophy. If you didn’t understand the concept I will gladly expand, if you did understand then what is the relevance of ‘sealed’ genes. Of course that is true, but is irrelevant to phenotypic changes resulting in a loss of reproductive fitness.
Then you refuted my original statement without the basic knowledge required to do so, unless of course you have access to opinion making a blanket statement that nutrition does not affect form or size. Do you?
I am. My statement was that nutrition affected size and shape. You refuted this apparently without any thought, much less the knowledge to support your refutation. The fact that I refer too disease does not make my original statement less true. It does make your refutation erroneous unless you care to dispute the effects of rickets.
So again you refute my statement without the knowledge required to do so without it becoming more than gainsaying. I don’t need to experiment on myself, this has all been done under controlled conditions and published in peer reviewed journals. Again I’m prepared to provide references to back up my statement, can you do likewise. Otherwise you’re simply stating opinion.
Thank you, that was exactly my point behind making that statement.
The one that occurs in the human, or any other population. Is there another possible interpretation? Question resubmitted with clarification.
Which is?
The only other one that my dictionary has stipulates that it must be a person. And even you couldn’t have been using this since you yourself used the term when referring to animals. That having been said every comment I’ve made is, so far as I can see, perfectly grammatically and technically correct, and you have entered into a semantic argument over a technical issue without feeling it necessary to consult an English dictionary to clarify your preconception of a words definition. This makes it very difficult to discuss anything.
Reference please. This is far radically different from what I learned at university and what is accepted in every ecology journal I’ve read in the past seven years. I’d really like to see the article stating this.
Correct as in you misinterpreted what you heard?
[note: I cleaned up the quote tags. Gaspode, preview is your friend. -manhattan]
[Edited by manhattan on 12-05-2000 at 08:22 AM]
