I don't understand Evolution. Please explain this little thing to me.?

You cannot get a baby to fly because a baby lacks the means of flying. Can you show how a domestic dog is so very different from a wolf. The degree of difference is far less than would be required to enable a baby to fly.

The second thing that you miss is the time taken. Men did not capture a wolf and say be a nice doggy and lay down by the fire after we hve fed you. It did not happen over night.

A Russian (who's name escapes me at this moment) did an experiment with a species of fox. He bred the foxes in captivity. From a litter he selected the ones that were the firendliest. He bred only from them. He repeated this over a number of generations. Not only did he over a number of years end up with foxes that were domesticated but he noticed other changes had occurred to, for example, their ear shape changed from the shape the wild foxes had to a more domestic dog shape. He did an experiment in the lifespan of one human that demonstrated how thorugh selecting for a behaviour enabled the domestication of a canid species.

It sounds silly because you're missing a huge chunk of the evolution equation: selection.

Evolution isn't a force, or a process - it's a result. If you have inheritance, variation, and selection, you get evolution.

Inheritance is pretty straightforward. Offspring inherit the traits of their parents.

Variation is simple, but it trips people up sometimes. With each new generation, there is variation. Offspring are like their parents, but aren't *exactly* like them, nor are they a perfect blend. Sometimes new traits pop up. This variation is also something that they are born with, not something that they acquire over the course of their life.

Here's where it tripped you up, though: variation isn't directed. It's a little bit of random difference from the parents - an offspring might be a little bit taller or shorter than their parents, or have lighter or darker colored fur, or be slightly faster or slower, etc. The point is that variation doesn't just automatically give offspring what they need to survive. Sometimes it can be beneficial, sometimes it can actually be detrimental, and most of the time, it's neutral.

And this is where the third part of the equation comes in: selection. Nature isn't a Disney movie - more individuals are born than can possibly survive, and death by old age pretty much doesn't happen. Those born with a little bit of beneficial variation are at an advantage, and have a higher chance of surviving and reproducing, and therefore passing on their traits to the next generation. Those with detrimental variation have a lower chance of survival. Eventually, those with beneficial traits will out-reproduce others in the population, and many generations down the road, everyone in the population will have inherited the trait. Repeat many different times, with many different traits, and eventually you start seeing significant change.

It's also important to keep in mind that none of this happens suddenly. Fully-formed, complex structures never suddenly appear - it's a gradual adaptation of a trait, through stages that all have some sort of benefit (even if that benefit is different from the final trait, like feathers being used for display and warmth before they were part of flight). This also means that evolution doesn't deal well with sudden, absolute requirements. When life moved onto land, for example, it gained the ability to spend more and more time out of the water before it lost the ability to stay IN the water. Sexual reproduction evolved and was well established before species lost the ability to reproduce asexually. And so on and so forth.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_01

How do humans change animals? Simple. Just look at selective breeding for desired traits. A Great Dane and a Chihuahua are both dogs, with the same ancestors. Humans selective bred those dogs with the traits they wanted, and over many generations, this was the result.

In the same way, humans selectively bred wild canines who had the traits they wanted, and fed and kept those animals, while either killing or driving away the ones that remained "wild". Over many generations, this resulted in a domesticated canine, a dog.

The same is happening right now, in Europe, where they have been breeding wild foxes, to produce a domesticated fox that can now be kept as a pet. Please google how this was done.

A theory in science is an overall explanation of the evidence we see in nature. It must be falsifiable and testable. Before Darwin many scientists accepted (not believed) that species changed over time. What Darwin (and Wallace) did, was provide the main mechanism for that change. Subsequent discoveries in genetics, DNA, and more and more fossils support the FACT of evolution, and the THEORY of evolution has never been falsified.

So let's see in a nutshell what Darwin (and Wallace)proposed.
1. more are produced than reproduce. FACT.
2. variation exists in nature due to mutations, crossing over and independent assortment of chromosomes, sexual selection, etc. FACT. That creates unequal individuals.
3. there is a competition for limited resources including food, mates, shelter, etc. leading to increased mortality rates if you don't get those resources. FACT.
4. those individuals with genetic traits that give them an edge in finding resources and avoiding mortality factors survive to reproduce. FACT. that is called natural selection.
5. those individuals that survive contribute their variations to the next generation in higher numbers than those who don't make it. FACT.

and over time the population changes. Evolution is a change of allele frequency of POPULATIONS over time. And over time and space speciation occurs and new species lead to classifying groups of them as new genera, families, orders, classes, and even phyla.

The more important aspect of evolution is that of unequal chance of success for the individual based on characteristics. With dogs, humans selected which characteristics they wanted to keep. Ones without the characteristics were not allowed to breed. In the real world, selection is simply a question of odds; individuals having some feature or features that helps them survive and reproduce simply leads to more of that feature in later generations relative to the individuals missing that feature. So, while the winnowing works on individuals, the result works in terms of populations. A single individual does not result in a change to the character of the average individual in the group. It takes time (many generations) for that to occur; many individuals have to see survival and reproduction because of the presence of a feature before pretty well all the population ends up having that feature.

Although there is a lot of chance involved, when dealing with large numbers and time, probability has its way. the one thing that humans did not used to be able to do was to change the existing pool of characteristics. We now do that with genetically modified organisms. We create desirable features (desirable for our needs) by genetic manipulation. Nature does that too, in a way, but it is simply random.

You have to udnerstand that almost all creatures have variability - that is, they are not identical in size, color, strength, speed, behavior, etc.

Humans selected the puppies that showed characteristics they wanted, then when those puppies were grown, the humans bred them and again selected the ones that had the characteristics they wanted. Provided the characteristic you want is there at all, you can select for it and strengthen it, so that over several generations, you get a creature that "breeds true" (all puppies show the desired characteristic). That is how you get a Jack Russell terrier from a wolf, because you are looking for a dog that hunts rats and can go down holes after them, or how you get a greyhound from a wolf because you want a dog that can catch rabbits.

But you can never create a dog that has wings, because the wolf did not have wings. Wolf DNA does not contain the genes necessary to make wings. In fact, there is only one kind of mammal that can fly - the bat.

Like how wolves turned into dogs ... How could the wolves change their DNA ...
Dogs are wolves! They didn't change their DNA, they can still cross breed. So too can coyotes.
This is simply an example of variation within the created kind. Even where this extends to actual speciation all life forms today are descended from the original created kinds.

Another example is cats. You can get a chain of hybridization all the way from tabby to tiger.

Natural selection is basically the concept that the animals that have the most sex survive better. Change happens gradually. Imagine you are shipwrecked on an island with a bunch of people. Maybe the people that are taller are better at getting coconuts out of trees, so the shorter people eventually die off. Taller people reproduce more, and there taller children reproduce more, and over time distinction is made.

Dogs are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding by humans. Pups that showed aggression were killed, those that had behavior that humans like were kept. Over 50 years this can make a big difference to a population in aggression and oddly enough, in some other features as well which do not seem to be linked.

A Siberian experiment that started in 1959 with foxes demonstrates how it might have worked. This is well known to evolutionary biologists.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xwq3rs_evolution-in-action-the-silver-fox-experiment_shortfilms

Wolves to dogs are a great example, because people still are breeding dogs. We don't have to make guesses about ancient history - you can research how they do it in as much detail as you want.

Evolution works by individuals with one set of genes having more surviving children than other individuals within the species.

Those wolves who were dangerous to humans got killed or driven out of the best territories, whereas those wolves who were useful to humans got fed and protected. So in the next generation, there were more wolves with the useful traits. One useful trait was being docile, so in each generation the most controllable wolves survived. Eventually humans could control which individual dogs were allowed to breed with each other. Then gene selection proceeded much faster than it could with only natural selection.

Evolution only works on existing genes. It can drive a species to the extreme of a trait that already exists, but it can't add something totally new. So you can breed for dogs with very good eyesight, but you can't spontaneously add wings to a wolf because none of the existing wolves already have a gene for wings. But if a mutation DID cause a wolf to be born with wings, you could protect that wolf so that it survives to adulthood, and then breed it with other wolves, to make more wolves with wings.

The theory goes that organisms evolve slowly in response to trends in nature because of natural selection.

Say, for example, you stuck twenty mice at the bottom of a ten foot ceramic bowl, and every day for generations you (and your children and your children's children) put food on a little ledge one foot up. Most of the mice wouldn't be able to climb the ceramics to reach the food, and they would die. But a few would be lucky or smart or clever enough or just luckily have the right claws for it: those would reach the food and survive, and breed and make children who could also reach the food. Keep that going for two hundred years and eventually almost all of the mice in the bowl would have claws adapted to climbing ceramics. That's the concept that evolution theory is based on.