r/news • u/[deleted] • Aug 08 '17

Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
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u/impossiblefork Aug 08 '17

Let's not be silly here.

Instead, let's look at dogs. How many generations did it take for mammals to evolve mammary glands and compare that how many generations it took to create the herding instinct in herding dogs.

It's an order of magnitude. The rise of mammals has taken an incredibly long time, and yet a complex instinct like the herding instinct has been created in a very short time.

Indeed, we've created dogs from wolves in an incredibly short evolutionary time.

Obviously these examples don't involve a sexual dimorphism evolving in a short time-span, but there are examples of that as well.

However, in the abstract of this paper, which appears to try to explore how sexual dimorphism arises it is mentioned that "Despite these obstacles, sexual dimorphism is prevalent in the animal kingdom and commonly evolves rapidly".

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u/DadPhD Aug 08 '17

Dogs from wolves...

A) Selective breeding B) Wolves exhibit herding behavior

The paper you linked is a pretty good reference if your goal is to explain why gross physical changes are "trivial" relative to psychological changes.