rationalskepticism.org

Calilasseia wrote:Funnily enough, there's a Tanita Tikaram song called Poor Cow.

But the fun part is, the whole "I've never seen a dog give birth to a cat" tripe that is stock creationist fare, not only demonstrates ignorance of several key points of evolutionary theory, but would fail even to constitute a valid observation, under one possible evolutionary scenario. That scenario consisting of [1] cats as currently constituted all becoming extinct for some reason, [2] a wild dog species moving into the same niche, and [3] over many generations, acquiring cat-like features via convergent evolution, leading to future radiation of organisms superficially resembling the previously extant, but now extinct, true cats. To the untrained eye, the resulting animals would end up resembling cats in appearance, to the point where anatomically naive individuals, familiar with extinct cats, would probably start labelling them 'cats'. Except that they would, in fact, be dogs, courtesy of their ancestry.

And for those who think that this scenario is ridiculously implausible, scenarios of a similar sort have actually occurred in the past. Artiodactyl mammals are, in the present, represented by primarily herbivorous species, such as sheep, cattle, deer, hippos, and pigs. However, one group of Artiodactyls in the past, the Entelodonts, were carnivorous mammals, colloquially referred to as "Terminator Pigs", courtesy of the fact that their morphology initially suggested a relationship with the Suidae. The largest of these, Daeodon, a North American species, was 6 feet high at the shoulder and close to 900 pounds in weight. What we have in these animals, is organisms originating from a pig like ancestor, that moved into the niche occupied in the present by hyaenas, though taxa such as Daeodon grew to be far larger than any present day hyaena.