With all of the troubling news in the world today, i thought I’d try something a little lighter this time, and it’s good to be able to point to something new and positive.
I think that we’re witnessing a rare moment of evolutionary random action that could lead to improved canines! Right in our own home and before our eyes.
Notice the headshot of our family dog, Riley. Look closely at his nose. See those two dimples on either side near his eyes? What could they be? 
Since they serve no real purpose, I believe that they are random genetic mutations, just waiting to find some Evolutionary purpose!
Of course I know that Darwinian Evolution can’t really postulate a “purpose”, since it’s supposed to be random and the result of sporadic improvements that cause the recipients to eat better, run faster, reproduce more, etc., so that the random event is then replicated and “improved” (there’s that pesky almost purposeful inference again—sorry!).
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out, if Evolution had a purpose, even though of course it can’t, of what could these dimples be the precursors?
Perhaps if they are repeated in his offspring, and some plumbing also randomly appears and randomly connects internally to the inside of the nose, then dogs in the future will be able to clean their eyes by sneezing! What a great advantage that will be when hunting prey in a dusty or muddy environment,
I feel certain that a dog with this full eye-cleaning improvement, begun here by Riley, will move far ahead of his peers, and females will be super-attracted to any male dog with clean eyes and a well groomed forehead.
This is how it must have been when the optic nerve first randomly appeared, and just needed a retina and a lens and a few other odds and ends to come along and fit perfectly together in order for there to be vision. 
Can Riley’s necessary but completely random extra plumbing be just around the corner, say in only a few million years?
Or the wing. Imagine how the first land animals must have felt, like Riley does today looking at his nose, when their hind legs were for some reason shrinking, and their forelegs were growing into half legs and half who-knew-what. Maybe they were to be blankets. Or maybe bug grabbers. Or maybe wings just happened for no reason. As some also say about our Climate, “the science is a little unsettled”–but not to worry–one of the theories must be correct. And then all they needed were special bones, muscles and more feathers to show up randomly later. No problem. 
I’m not sure how these animals ran faster on those smaller back legs while they waited a few million years for those wings to work, but somehow Evolution finessed it.
And ditto the first land animals which transitioned to the sea and grew fins and blowholes, to become whales. As they floundered around in the shallow end of the ocean for a few million years on partial legs, it was nice of the stubbornly not-evolving sharks to mostly leave them alone. Another Evolutionary benign kindness. That’s the theory, right?
Speaking of land animals becoming whales, maybe Riley is actually on the way to becoming an aquadog, and those dimples are really the precursors of a dual snorkel! Who knows? Isn’t Evolution fun and random?
So there you have it. It’s a great day on the planet, as we notice Evolution hard at work without any purpose, despite how scientists appear to look back and assign Evolution an impossible foreknowledge of later events, and we speculate about what those dimples could become if just given a million years or so to mutate.
The serious problem, of course, is not with Evolution, but with people. Just like we’ve interfered with the Climate, so we’ve interfered with Evolution.
For our own selfish reasons, we had Riley neutered. And so we’ve upset the natural process. We will never know whether Riley is the first to prepare the way for automatic canine eye-cleaning, or for an aquadog. Sorry!
But keep your evolved eyes open, and hopefully Evolutionary precursors will jump out at you as well. Examples like Riley’s dimples show why it is so easy and logical to believe in Evolution, instead of in the absurd theory of Intelligent Design. People who believe in a Creator should stop dogging us with their impossible beliefs.
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