DARWINISM'S RAU DEAL (via Robert Schwartz):

Can You Revive an Extinct Animal? (D.T. MAX, January 1, 2006, NY Times Magazine)

The quagga was a horselike animal native to southern Africa that went extinct in 1883. Its head, neck and shoulders and sometimes the forward part of its flank were covered with stripes; the back part of its torso, its rump and legs were unstriped. An old joke among the Dutch, the first Europeans to settle in South Africa, was that the quagga was a zebra that had forgotten its pajama pants. [Reinhold] Rau's goal, which he has been working toward for three decades, is to breed the quagga back into existence. His approach is to take zebras that look more quaggalike than the norm and mate them with one another, generation after generation, progressively erasing the stripes from the back part of their bodies.

This may sound preposterous. How likely is it that deliberate breeding can retrace the path of natural selection by which the quagga split off from the plains zebra more than a hundred thousand years ago? But over the years Rau's project has gained some establishment support. Several scientific studies of the zebra family, for instance, have suggested that plains zebras and quaggas were closely enough related to make Rau's project feasible from a genetic point of view. This is important to Rau, because he doesn't seem to want just to create a quagga look-alike but to recreate - or at least closely approximate - the genetic original. And beginning in the late 80's, the Namibian and South African park systems supplied Rau with promising animals so that he could put his ideas into practice. (The South African park system, as well as the natural history museum, also absorbs some of the small, ongoing cost of the project.)

Over years of breeding, Rau has made great progress creating zebras that look like quaggas.

So not only can we intelligent design them out of existence but then back into existence...and in just twenty years?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2006 4:59 PM