How did the first dog find a mate

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"How did the first dog find a mate?" is a straw man argument offered by some creationists in an effort to disprove the theory of evolution. A similar objection to evolution is the question: which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The argument takes the evolutionary claim that dogs evolved from wolves and attempts to deny it by claiming that if dogs evolved from wolves then at some point a wolf gave birth to a dog but unless both a male and a female dog were both born then the first dog could not have mated to produce more dogs.

While this may be convincing to anybody familiar only with the distorted an oversimplified view of evolution presented by its deniers, the argument is based on a completely false premise. Evolutionary science does not claim that a wolf ever gave birth to a dog. Also, species are "fuzzy" concepts with some pairs species having a low fertility but can breed occasionally. Wolves give birth to wolves that are virtually identical to the parents with only, at the most, small changes in the genetic makeup.

Each generation's genetic makeup is passed to successive generations along with whatever new variations occur. Over many generations these small changes accumulate and eventually there comes a point where the current generation could no longer interbreed with their ancestors and is now a different species. At no point in the process was any generation a different species from its parent generation; at no point did a wolf give birth to a dog.

One way to visualize the process is to consider an old home movie. Each successive frame is almost identical to the frames immediately before and after it. If you project frames 50 and 51, for example, side by side you will note only trivial distinctions between them. If you project frames 50 and 1000 side by side they may be showing completely different images with very little in common.

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