Hope I dont sound stupid

Ok, I was thinking about this earlier today.

My question is about dog species in the wild.

A long long time ago there were all dog species running wild around the world.

Humans then started to keep them as pets and then eventually breed them.

You would think that there are German shepards running around in the wild as well as retrievers somewhere but there probably arent.

Did humans make these animals extinct in the wild or are they still out there?

I know there are wild dogs in africa.

Pardon me if I sound like an idiot and have not fully thought this out properly. :P

Dog breeds as we know them today came about from breeding dogs for specific traits. They are all the same species.

You can probably find a lot of research on the web, but as I understand it wild dogs were line bred to produce the traits we see today. Of course, I'm tired and my brain may be on the blink....

Here's a link that may be of some help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog

All of our pet dogs were domesticated from wild species and selectively bred over the years to become the pet's we now know today. There are no wild poodles, pugs, german shepards, dalmatians, etc in the wild and there never were any.

How you go from a wolf or fox to a poodle is a great example of genetic engineering and evolution rolled into one. Line breeding or selective breeding is by the way, just a longer version of genetic engineering. And the dramatic changes that occur along the way are inherent of evolution.
There have been experiments that showed how quickly you can go from something like a wild fox, to a human friendly pet that didn't even look like it's wild counterpart in just a matter of 30 or so years, by just selective breeding.
So take a wild fox or wolf and do the same thing but instead of having only 30 years, do it over 3,000 years. That is how we end up with so many different types of dogs that for the most part all came from the same wild ancestors.

The same goes for most domestic animals such as cats, horses, cows, goats, pigs, etc. They all came from a few wild ancestors but over the years have become the many various breeds you see today.

No, you don't sound stupid making this thread. It is something that I have wondered as well. The thing with cats really confused me until recently.

from what i've heard, they all started as wolves, foxes, or dingos.

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Originally Posted by N4S

Did humans make these animals extinct in the wild or are they still out there?

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Man shapes the world around him by breeding and/or growing for specific traits. We've "invented" breeds of dogs out of wild genes in the very same manner we "invented" corn and what we recognize as bananas now (take a look at a wild banana if you want to see what I mean).

Selective breeding (unnatural selection if you will) is what takes a wild canine and makes it a poodle. A domestic dog has far less genetic diversity than a wild dog.. a poodle for instance has lost the genetic ability to produce a normal shedding double coat.

Accumulated genetic mistakes (mutations that cause non shedding hair, loss of pigment, stunted growth etc as in a white toy poodle) along with natural variation were selected for by people to produce a pet breed in the case of a poodle..

No new information has been added to the DNA.. hence a domestic dog and a wolf can still interbreed.. they are the same animal still, even though they appear so different. This isn't evolution, and I know I may ruffle some feathers here by saying so. :P

The dogs we have today were probably selectively bred from different species of wild dogs and wolves that are mostly now extinct. For example, the wolves here in Alaska before the glaciers melted were of a different species (sub species? I can't remember) of wolf than what lives here today. The huskies and malamutes may have been bred from those wolves instead of the ones here now, depending how far back you want to go. An example of trait selection is breeding for the upraised tail in huskies; some people think this is so the Natives could distinguish them from wolves at a distance. No one really knows 100% where all the variations of dogs originated from. Some scientists say "wolves"... but there are multiple species of wolves, and like you mentioned, dogs like the African wild dog (plus whatever-else-I'm-forgetting). It's a really fascinating topic to me and a person could theorize endlessly about it and never get bored. :D

To add to this, 90% of the dog breeds we have today were made/invented/whatever in the past 100 years. Never under estimate the power of man. Lettuce, cabbage, brussel sprouts, etc. all orginate from the same plant line.

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Originally Posted by panthercz

So take a wild fox or wolf and do the same thing but instead of having only 30 years, do it over 3,000 years. That is how we end up with so many different types of dogs that for the most part all came from the same wild ancestors.

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I have read somewhere that the coloring of foxes has a direct link to how well they take to human handlers.
The lighter whiter colored foxes were more apt to approach the guy doing the research over the darker red foxes.

It's all selective breeding.

I've often wondered about how stupid chickens are, how the heck did they survive in the wild? LOL, I do know the answer to that one. Just imagine a fat hen running around in the wild. :rolleyes:

There is a original wild species of chicken. Hard to locate, although there is now a domestic line of those that mimic the wild.

Dogs are domestic. There are no wild poodles racing around the jungles of Germany hunting bags of kibble. (cute fact, poodles orginated in Germany as a hunting breed, and later were bred down to the small size for lap dogs in england)
Dogs were originally kept because they were useful. Breeds were hunting dogs, or later on, guards, and herders. Only later on in more civilized times were dogs turned into pets. In Roman times, dogs that were kept to guard the house were still expected to scavenge for their food.
Dogs are pack animals, which is why they took so well to being domesticated.

Maybe all dogs originate from the chupacabra.

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Originally Posted by Glee

The dogs we have today were probably selectively bred from different species of wild dogs and wolves that are mostly now extinct. For example, the wolves here in Alaska before the glaciers melted were of a different species (sub species? I can't remember) of wolf than what lives here today. The huskies and malamutes may have been bred from those wolves instead of the ones here now, depending how far back you want to go. An example of trait selection is breeding for the upraised tail in huskies; some people think this is so the Natives could distinguish them from wolves at a distance. No one really knows 100% where all the variations of dogs originated from. Some scientists say "wolves"... but there are multiple species of wolves, and like you mentioned, dogs like the African wild dog (plus whatever-else-I'm-forgetting). It's a really fascinating topic to me and a person could theorize endlessly about it and never get bored. :D

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Dire wolf?

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Originally Posted by N4S

Maybe all dogs originate from the chupacabra.

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Just the chihuahua. :P

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Originally Posted by Ginevive

Dire wolf?

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Maybe that's what I was thinking of. Or it may have been another wolf all together; I heard it during a natural history lecture. I need to pay more attention in class.

Dire wolves died off, while grey wolves continued.
I believe dogs came from a common ancester to modern wolves, coyotes, wild dogs... etc.
Some breeds probably came directly from wolves, just were bred to different looks. Since dog breeds originate from all over, you'd have to check into exactly what started that particular breed.
The Japanese breeds are unlikely to be part of the same linage as the ones from Northern europe/North america. Possible, maybe.

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Originally Posted by Shelby

Selective breeding (unnatural selection if you will) is what takes a wild canine and makes it a poodle. A domestic dog has far less genetic diversity than a wild dog.. a poodle for instance has lost the genetic ability to produce a normal shedding double coat.

Accumulated genetic mistakes (mutations that cause non shedding hair, loss of pigment, stunted growth etc as in a white toy poodle) along with natural variation were selected for by people to produce a pet breed in the case of a poodle..

No new information has been added to the DNA.. hence a domestic dog and a wolf can still interbreed.. they are the same animal still, even though they appear so different. This isn't evolution, and I know I may ruffle some feathers here by saying so. :P

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Yes it is evolution.......evolution is the change in gene frequencies of a population over time. So it is evolution.....

You could make an argument that it isn't speciation. You would be relying heavily on a lab-based biological species concept......(which means you might have to consider a Ball and a Angolan python the same species)...would a wolf in the wild really mate with a domesticated dog?

Bottom line.....Speciation and Evolution are not the same thing.....

Chickens can be pretty hard to catch. I guess that the wilder types would be the banties; smaller, faster. I can easily catch our two larger roosters (RI red, white meat-type) but they are big, fat, spoiled butterballs. Now, to catch our little banty hen.. I honestly think that if I had to catch her, or die, I would be dead meat!
But the big roosters do have quite an attack. Our white one got mad when Mark picked up the red. He started karate-kicking Mark trying to get him with his spurs! Ouch, roos have big spurs..

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Originally Posted by Mendel's Balls

Yes it is evolution.......evolution is the change in gene frequencies of a population over time. So it is evolution.....

You could make an argument that it isn't speciation. You would be relying heavily on a lab-based biological species concept......(which means you might have to consider a Ball and a Angolan python the same species)...would a wolf in the wild really mate with a domesticated dog?

Bottom line.....Speciation and Evolution are not the same thing.....

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I don't see how a reduction in information is evolution.

For varying reasons, animals that diversify into different species are less likely to interbreed in the wild, though usually they still can successfully. Species isn't a hard and fast term (just seeing how frequently taxonomy changes will show you that!)

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Originally Posted by Shelby

I don't see how a reduction in information is evolution.

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It's a common misunderstanding.

Evolution is purely change over time. There is no implied value. Information can increase or decrease. The only criteria is the success of the population in question. Superfluity of function can be wasteful, and so skills, instincts, and even organs can be a waste of tissue...hence whale's loss of feet, snake's loss of legs, and horse's loss of toes. They lack the genetic information to create those items, because it was unecessary for their survival, and was eliminated.

Sure but can you give an example of where information was gained?

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Originally Posted by slartibartfast

It's a common misunderstanding.

Evolution is purely change over time. There is no implied value. Information can increase or decrease. The only criteria is the success of the population in question. Superfluity of function can be wasteful, and so skills, instincts, and even organs can be a waste of tissue...hence whale's loss of feet, snake's loss of legs, and horse's loss of toes. They lack the genetic information to create those items, because it was unecessary for their survival, and was eliminated.

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Well put.

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Originally Posted by Shelby

Sure but can you give an example of where information was gained?

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Natural Selection doesn't really create new information as slartibartfast pointed out. Instead natural selection acts on the tremendous amount of variation and information already in a genome. It hones and streamlines the information over generations to produce a population of organisms that have adaptations that allow those organisms to better survive and reproduce in their environment.

Just because natural selection doesn't create information or variation, doesn't mean that there are not mechanisms in evolutionary theory that account for the generation of new information. Novel variation/new information is created by the various types of mutation as well as gene duplication. Genes within an organism that are related by a duplication event are said to be paralogs. Hemoglobin (oxygen transporting protein in blood) and myglobin (oxygen transporting protein in muscle) are paralogs.

Also see http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm for a good example of new information created by (frameshift) mutation. Some populations of bacteria have evolved the ability to metabolize (eat) nylon via a frameshift mutation. Nylon is a man-made chemical that wasn't present on earth before the 1930s.

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Originally Posted by panthercz

All of our pet dogs were domesticated from wild species and selectively bred over the years to become the pet's we now know today. There are no wild poodles, pugs, german shepards, dalmatians, etc in the wild and there never were any.

How you go from a wolf or fox to a poodle is a great example of genetic engineering and evolution rolled into one. Line breeding or selective breeding is by the way, just a longer version of genetic engineering. And the dramatic changes that occur along the way are inherent of evolution.
There have been experiments that showed how quickly you can go from something like a wild fox, to a human friendly pet that didn't even look like it's wild counterpart in just a matter of 30 or so years, by just selective breeding.
So take a wild fox or wolf and do the same thing but instead of having only 30 years, do it over 3,000 years. That is how we end up with so many different types of dogs that for the most part all came from the same wild ancestors.

The same goes for most domestic animals such as cats, horses, cows, goats, pigs, etc. They all came from a few wild ancestors but over the years have become the many various breeds you see today.

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I do agree with the idea selective breeding and line breeding created the vast array of dog breeds we have today. However, the initial transition from wolf to dog may have been more of a cooperative synergy between humans and proto-dogs than a conscious, deliberate domestication effort on the part of early human societies. See the following articles.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dog/garbage.html

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dog/slideshow.html

The first linked article makes a good case that the wolves that became dogs may have had more to do with their domestication than humans. Sorta a self-domestication to take advantage of the new niche offered by human settlements.

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Originally Posted by python.princess

from what i've heard, they all started as wolves, foxes, or dingos.

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Yea to the first and third, and a few more 'breeds', but no to the foxes. A fox doesnt have enough chromozomes to breed with, or simply to even a a dog.. Im pretty sure that canines have 73 chromozomes (give or take a few), and foxes have less.

So no, I dont think foxes are consiterd canines.. But all of that other stuff is. lol.

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Originally Posted by Mendel's Balls

Well put.
Natural Selection doesn't really create new information as slartibartfast pointed out. Instead natural selection acts on the tremendous amount of variation and information already in a genome. It hones and streamlines the information over generations to produce a population of organisms that have adaptations that allow those organisms to better survive and reproduce in their environment.

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Agreed.

As for the nylon digesting bacteria..

A loss in information can actually give a bacteria that ability. Same deal with developing resistances to antibiotics.

All that needs to happen is a digestive enzyme recieving a mutation which renders it less specific.. enzymes fit their respective molecules sort of like a key. A slightly less specific one could bond with a new molecule (for instance nylon) thus giving the bacterium the ability to digest a new substance. The enzyme is going to be a bit less efficient however, at performing its original job. Both nylon and proteins are broken down by breaking amide (ammonia derived) links.. so it's quite concievable that the enzyme could mutate to digest nylon.

Another example is sickle cell anemia. This mutates the red blood corpuscles into a sickle shape. This renders anyone with this mutation immune to malaria, however it makes the hemoglobin less efficient in carrying oxygen.. not the best thing! Sickle cell anemia is co-dominant, and people who are heterozygous for it have minimal harm from the mutation, while still reaping the benefit of malaria immunity.