As it happens, I'd read about Dmitri K. Belyaev's fox breeding experiments a number of years ago and, I'm sorry, they don't support the theory of natural selection and atheist materialism at all as the foxes allowed to be bred within the lines he developed instead of murdered and skinned for the barbarous, cruel fur trade, were not naturally selected, they were artificially selected not only by humans, they were artificially selected by scientists to see if they could develop foxes with specific behavioral characteristics which, to some extent achieved, also selected for traits they weren't necessarily expecting to see at the commencement of the experiment. Once those showed up, they were included in the experiment.
I will point out to you several things you apparently ignored in the text of the Scientific American article you refer to
a Russian scientist, may be the man most responsible for our understanding of the process by which wolves were domesticated into our canine companions, What might foxes be able to tell us about the domestication of dogs?
"May," "might" aren't definite claims that they tell us even what's asserted in the article, and that's a lot more restrained than the claim that it proves natural selection, the material origin of minds and that materialist atheism rules, man. And I'll note this in the concluding paragraph
these foxes could provide us with a sort of natural experiment
Well, no they couldn't and the contents of the article, itself would have led a careful observer or reader to the reason it can't provide us with that.
The whole thing, I'm no longer sorry to have to point out, proves that you can develop a line of development through, brace yourself, intelligent choices in an intelligently designed experiment. It's not an example of natural selection, it is an example of intelligent design. The experiment was anything but natural in that only "less than" 20% of any generation were allowed to breed within the program, those "less than" 20% at the choice of the experimenters and for anything but naturally selected traits. A naturally selected trait would have been something like an ability to escape from the fur trade to live in the wild instead of as an animal bred and killed for human purposes. It is in no way "a sort of natural experiment."
There is no scientifically designed experiment that can escape the fact that the results of that were through the intelligent design of the experimenter, there isn't even any way to remove the role of human intelligence from the description of the results of an experiment or the description of any naturally occuring, observed event. That's probably many times more relevant to the extremely complex phenomena of life than it is when it has been found to be inescapable in the observation of extremely (by comparison) simple objects and events in physics in the early 20th century.
I don't know because I've concentrated mostly on the malignant effects of the doctrine of natural selection in the human population but the last I knew all of the various lines of organisms bred by human beings hadn't actually resulted in anything like the diversity of life. Arguably, I guess, you could say that cross breeding had bred new lines of small fruit or grain - though that they could be cross bred, artificially, makes you wonder if the definition of "species" is inadequate to describe a real thing, the direct manipulation of genes, of course, isn't an example of natural selection or natural anything, it's most unnatural. At any rate, since that article in Scientific American points out the claim that Belyaev's experiment with a different species, foxes, tells us something about the unobservable change in wolves that produced dogs which became companions of people, that's not really an example of a change in species in so far as some dogs and some wolves breed and have fertile offspring which could mate either with wolves or dog. I would imagine that the artificially developed foxes could breed with their wild cousins, even now. I wonder what the survival rate of those young as compared to entirely wild lines would be or how long they would persist in the natural population. If some of them survived and their offspring were incorporated in the natural population, I don't think the results would support natural selection.
Nope, it doesn't support your contentions that natural selection is a thing, the extent to which conventional Darwinists had to ignore so much about Darwin's arguments - such as its enormous dependence on the very opposite of natural selection, artificial breeding - only shows how they reduced an unknowable, billions of years long and vastly huge phenomenon into a ridiculously simplified and schematic description in line with human institutions - so as to pretend they really understood the phenomenon of the diversity of life. I doubt that the billions of species, the trillions of variations in life developed for any one reason. I suspect there are thousands or millions of "mechanisms" that created the diversity of life as we observe it and that science will never know most of them. I wondered a while back at how many times in the billions of years in any of the lines that developed all of those species, scenarios such as a "bottle neck," a drastic accidental reduction in the numbers that would go on to continue that line happened, "selecting" the individuals that would carry on in ways that had nothing to do with their inherited traits. Does "natural selection" constantly have to be reset whenever that happened? Isn't the "power" of natural selection as the ultimate explanation of the development of that species reduced every time that happened in that line of life? And that's only one such non-Darwinian possibility, any time sheer chance - lightning strikes, location during a storm or other weather or geological event, even just happening to be happened on by a predator with no means of escape, etc - was the reason for the survival of one individual as opposed to another surviving and breeding is a similar reduction of the role that Darwinian natural selection would play in it. I doubt you could effectively even model the force of such things in the actual survival of the line of life but I'll bet added up they would reduce "natural selection" into something of nugatory instead of ultimate importance in the history of it.
I think natural selection is way, way oversold through ignoring the problems with it. It certainly can't disprove that species developed through intelligent design, I don't think science can do that. Which should have been no surprise as that kind of thing - so desired by so many of the devotees of scientism - never really had any business being inserted into science. Scientists should stick with what they can do instead of pretending they can do what they can't.
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