Ok...now, I'm crazy. Dopers, a little help?

Factual Questions
1

I don’t know what brought me to the webpage I’m reading…(actually I do, it’s a site called www.starchildproject.com), but these couple of paragraphs have thrown me for a loop. Can any of you dispute this? I know it’s long but, it’s well worth the read…sorta. :wink:

BTW, the page is http://www.lloydpye.com/A-Literal.htm
-K

All examples of plant and animal “domestication” are incredible in their own right, but perhaps the most incredible is the cheetah. There is no question it was one of the first tamed animals, with a history stretching back to early Egypt, India, and China. As with all such examples, it could only have been created through selective breeding by Neolithic hunters, gatherers, or early farmers. One of those three must get the credit.

The cheetah is the most easily tamed and trained of all the big cats. No reports are on record of a cheetah killing a human. It seems specifically created for high speeds, with an aerodynamically designed head and body. Its skeleton is lighter than other big cats; its legs are long and slim, like the legs of a greyhound. Its heart, lungs, kidneys, and nasal passages are enlarged, allowing its breathing to jump from 60 per minute at rest to 150 bpm during a chase. Its top speed is 70 miles per hour while a thoroughbred tops out at around 38 mph. Nothing on a savanna can outrun it. It can be outlasted, but not outrun.

Cheetahs are unique because they combine physical traits of two distinctly different animal families: dogs and cats. They belong to the family of cats, but they look like long-legged dogs. They sit and hunt like dogs. They can only partially retract their claws, like dogs instead of cats. Their paws are thick and hard like dogs. They contract diseases that only dogs suffer from. The light-colored fur on their body is like the fur of a shorthaired dog. However, to climb trees they use the first claw on their front paws in the same way that cats do. In addition to their “dog only” diseases, they also get “cat only” ones. And the black spots on their bodies are, inexplicably, the texture of cat’s fur.

There is something even more inexplicable about cheetahs. Genetic tests have been done on them and the surprising result was that in the 50 specimens tested, they were all—every one—genetically identical with all the others! This means the skin or internal organs of any of the thousands of cheetahs in the world could be switched with the organs of any other cheetah and not be rejected. The only other place such physical homogeneity is seen is in rats and other animals that have been genetically altered in labs.

Cue the music from “The Twilight Zone”….

2

Dispute which part? A lot of what they say about cheetahs is true: they can be domesticated and historically were domesticated for use as hunting animals. They are cats with some doglike characteristics although the part about being able to contract “diseases that only dogs suffer from” I would like to see a cite for.

I have also heard that all cheetahs are very closely related genetically but I have never heard that they were identical. They obviously can’t all literally be identical because we have male and female cheetahs for starters.

3

Hmmm, maybe I just reacted at that part because of the rest of the webpage, it deals with some weird theories that I’ve not thought of before. It was just when I got to that part that I said. Huh?

4

Sorry, hit submit too early.

The genetic similarity doesn’t have to be a result of human engineering. It could simply be due to environmental factors that caused a population crash among cheetahs fairly recently from which they have not been able to fully recover.

I disagree with the part about the cheetah must have been artificially selected (bred by man) to arrive at its present form. I don’t see any reason why natural selection could not have done this, and I suspect that the number of cheetahs which were ever domesticated is so small as to constitute an insignificant part of the species’ present genetic heritage.

5

Cheetahs are not literally identical. They just have a serious lack of genetic variability. (This hinders breeding a lot. In the wild a female cheetah will eventually find a sufficiently different male that a successful mating will occur. In zoos, there’s not a lot of mates to choose from.) There is no Twilight Zone music required. They merely went thru a genetic bottleneck 10,000-30,000 years ago. (And are going thru another one now.)

As to fur and secondary characteristics, look at humans and naked mole rats. Hairless, social, eats roots. Wow! Must be related! (Not!)

Certain characteristics result from parallel evolution. How you eat decides a lot on how you look.

6

I just perused the rest of the page linked to in the OP. Man, there is enough there for about a dozen GQ/GD threads.

Suffice it to say the guy whose page that is is a little…confused.

7

Cheetahs are very much inbred…

http://www.mycatcenter.com/inbreeding.htm

8

I’d agree with that…maybe it’s the rest of the website. It’s pretty crazy.

9

Hunt like dogs? How, exactly, do very solitary animals with high sprint speeds and no stamina hunt like pack animals with moderate sprint speeds and good stamina?

10

Reeder, I’m not trying to disrupt the source you gave. Here’s a quote from the same site in the OP. I’m not saying he’s right…I’m just saying lots of bases seem to be covered.

"The problem of the cheetahs’ genetic uniformity is explained by something now known as the “bottleneck effect.” What it presumes is that the wild cheetah population—which must have been as genetically diverse as its long history indicates—at some recent point in time went into a very steep population decline that left only a few breeding pairs alive. From that decimation until now they have all shared the same restricted gene pool. Unfortunately, there is no record of any extinction events that would selectively remove cheetahs and leave every other big cat to develop its expected genetic variation. So for as unlikely as it seems, the “bottleneck” theory is accepted as another scientific gospel.

Here it is appropriate to remind scientists of Carl Sagan’s famous riposte when dealing with their reviled pseudoscience: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” It seems apparent that Sagan learned that process in-house. It also leads us, finally, to a discussion of humans, who are so genetically recent that we, too, have been forced into one of those “bottleneck effects” that attempt to explain away the cheetah.

Like all plants and animals, whether wild or domesticated, humans are supposed to be the products of slight, gradual improvements to countless generations spawned by vastly more primitive forebears. This was firmly believed by all scientists in the 1980’s, when a group of geneticists decided to try to establish a more accurate date for when humans and chimps split from their presumed common ancestor. Paleontologists used fossilized bones to establish a timeline that indicated the split came between five and eight million years ago. That wide bracket could be narrowed, geneticists believed, by charting mutations in human mitochondrial DNA, small bits of DNA floating outside the nuclei of our cells. So they went to work collecting samples from all over the world.

When the results were in, none of the geneticists could believe it. They had to run their samples through again and again to be certain. Even then, there was hesitancy about announcing it. Everyone knew there would be a firestorm of controversy, starting with the paleontologists, who would be given the intellectual equivalent of a black eye and a bloody nose, and their heads dunked into a toilet for good measure. This would publicly embarrass them in a way that had not happened since the Piltdown hoax was exposed."

11

I heard, (TV series ‘evolution’) that the feline population was once decimated by a type of feline AIDS? Is that a myth?

12

“It lasted only as long as they needed to understand that all he had really provided was the outline of a forest of an idea, one that only in broad terms seemed to account for life’s stunningly wide array. His forest lacked enough verifiable trees.”
Has he read Origin of the Species? It is not the outline of an idea… it provides evidence and examples. It provides “proof” (although no proof is ultimate).
Which leads me to the question, does anyone have any links to non-creationist sites with legitimate evidence for things contrare to the theory of evolution?

13

Who Stole My Name
Which leads me to the question, does anyone have any links to non-creationist sites with legitimate evidence for things contrare to the theory of evolution?

I’m with you. I’d love to read those sites. You may want to read the rest of that site though, it’s not ‘exactly’ a creationist site. It’s a bit different.

14

Yeh I’ve noticed. He does however bring up that transitional species bs… If someone’s taking pictures of you at 1 frame/10s what are the chances they’ll catch you blinking?

15

I found one.
http://www.trueorigin.org/isakrbtl.asp
It’s arguments are the ordinary ones though… even includes an argument about entropy and the second law of thermo-dynamics. Apparently, they think evolution creates things more “ordered”. Since when? In fact, it fits in with entropy, mutations are entropy. It, [sigh] mentions transition species. Their final argument? Wait for it… “Evolution is Only a Theory;
It Hasn’t Been Proved”… and any theory can be…?? that’s why they’re theories. Perhaps I should head over to Great Debates.