The Chihuahua Mystery
Where Did Small Dogs Come From?
BY DAVID S. LEWIS
Much ink has been devoted in these pages lately to dogs: police dogs, barking dogs, how to train dogs, and wolves—this month we present controversial revelations regarding canis lupus occidentalis and its importation to Yellowstone that might be characterized as—Oops, we introduced the wrong subspecies.
We here at the Montana Pioneer, though, often feel a need to delve even more deeply behind the appearances of things, what with so much time on our hands. So, while you were working 9 to 5 dealing with the mundane drudgeries of life (the kind we avoid), we've been pushing the envel-ope in order to bring you answers to those deep nagging questions that somehow in your busy schedule you weren’t able to address. For example, where did dogs come from—little dogs?
The the lazy answer is they came from the Yucatan as descen-dents of wolves. That's what the experts say, most of them anyway. But those who read these pages with any regularity know how we feel about experts. Yes, some actually know what they're talking about, but too many are beholding to the political consensus of their peer group and employers, repeating what they’ve been told rather than applying common sense and critical thinking.
Cases in point—the Shi Tzu (spelled as two words for obvious reasons) and the Chihuahua. Do the experts seriously expect us to believe these two strange little animals somehow derive from the towering (by comparison) predator we call the wolf? Such a notion defies common sense, although that does not seem to prohibit experts from advancing a nonsensical proposition, owing to their allegiance, as we see it, to what passes for science but that is often mere political consensus.
How, after all, could any process of natural selection, or selective breeding during domestication, reduce an awesome predator like a wolf to a tiny bug-eyed animal (with a penchant for incessant yapping) that fits neatly into a lady's purse.
DNA studies show, we are told, that all dogs and wolves are related, or have a common ancestor somewhere back in Eurasia 30,000 to 130,000 years ago, which is to say, they have similar genes and that’s about all we know. Clearly, there is some other factor or link involved in the progression, digression, evolution, devolution, or appearance of these tiny animals we call dogs but that more resemble rodents.
Guesswork, more over, is one of the foremost characteristics of evolutionary biology, as practiced. A bone here, a trait there, a good guess—and pretty soon you have what passes for a missing link (as with Java Man, pieced together from disparate monkey bones on the island of Java). Or, more likely, any missing link will do when there is no missing link to be found, when missing links are the norm, even ubiquitous across the fossil record, which in layman’s terms means the evolutionary dots are usually connected by a wing and a prayer, not any incremental progression that proves the case.
With such a large elephant in the room, the failure to prove the most simple and direct connections between species throughout time, and instead relying only on quantum leaps in alleged development from species to species, common sense tells us some other factor may be at play, and that that mysterious factor is the missing link.
What could that missing link be? How does a wolf become a Chihua-hua, if at all? What agent could possibly produce such a result? And don't tell me it was random mutations, because you don't see random mutations changing canis lupus into canis rodentus in a relatively short time span (would require an eternity, literally), if such phenomena take place at all, as experts would have us believe.
One idea gaining ground recently is the ancient alien theory—bug-eyed creatures of another kind, they say, the third kind, could have had much to do with events that took place in prehistory, and as everyone knows, aliens are big on genetic manipulation (if you didn't know, you heard it here first).
Imagine some ancient astronaut playing God in his star lab, or wherever it is aliens do their gene splicing. In a petri dish, he's got the makings of a rodent, just a weekend experiment, and nearby a Timber-wolf (barely snarling under the influence of a paralyzing ray) beamed up from what will one day be called the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Then, lo and behold, the wolf sneezes (shi tzu!), ejecting a small but nevertheless significant quantity of DNA into the petri dish.
Now, the alien has no knowledge of this, he's busy doing other things, things we can’t imagine, but what eventually emerges from that Petri dish resembles, well, a Shi Tzu, or a Chihuahua.
Far fetched? Of course it is. It’s a theory though, as reasonable, even more so, as all dogs including Chihuahuas and Shi Tzus (bless you) coming from wolves, and to be honest we're leaning more toward the alien intervention theory because it would fill in a lot of missing pieces (links) in the puzzle.
The truth is, and this is the kicker, no matter what aspect of life on earth you look at, when you try to discern its origin, by observation, using common sense, using all your mental, intuitional and human faculties, which is to say, science, you run into a brick wall. The experts tell us they have it all figured out, but as we have shown they can be restricted by doctrines that form the boxes they inhabit mentally, while we heretics (you and me) grant ourselves an ability to think freely, out of the box. And their theory of the origin of life, by the way, the origin of the first cell, is as incredible as our shi tzu! theory—look into it, the dots don’t actually connect.
So doing, you’ll be looking into the tiniest of things, the cell, billions of which form the nose on your face, your eyes, hands, and brain—see the infinitesimal intricacy of design that resembles the most complex computer software and that was present in the first cell to have somehow reproduced in an ancient sea, they imagine, spontaneously through some random event and magically with all its reproductive DNA already intact.
See, they hit the wall, for it requires prodigious mental acrobatics and fantasy to pretend you know the origin of the first cell (and the second) with all its native design and reproductive capacities.
How, to complicate matters, did it then design itself as a Chihuahua or a Shi Tzu? —Gesundheit.
