"In 1855, Charles Darwin decided to establish his own pigeon loft at his home in Kent. This was despite the fact that he described pigeon-breeding as “a horrid bore” in his letter of 19 March 1855 to his cousin, William Fox, in which he also signalled his intention to write his Origin of Species (published in 1859):
My dear Fox … As you have a Noah’s Ark, I do not doubt that you have pigeons … . Now what I want to know is, at what age nestling pigeons have their tail feathers sufficiently developed to be counted. … I am hard at work on my notes collecting and comparing them, in order in some 2 or 3 years to write a book with all the facts and arguments, which I can collect, for & versus the immutability of species. I want to get the young of our domestic breeds, to see how young, and to what degree the differences appear. I must either breed myself (which is no amusement but a horrid bore to me) the pigeons or buy them young …
On the Breeds of the Domestic Pigeon.—Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons. I have kept every breed which I could purchase or obtain … . The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing. … Altogether at least a score of pigeons might be chosen, which if shown to an ornithologist, and he were told that they were wild birds, would certainly, I think, be ranked by him as well-defined species.... Great as the differences are between the breeds of pigeons, I am fully convinced that the common opinion of naturalists is correct, namely, that all have descended from the rock-pigeon (Columba livia), including under this term several geographical races or sub-species, which differ from each other in the most trifling respects.
Darwin was cleverly able to apply selection to breed pigeons so different from each other that, if found in the wild, a biologist might have put them into separate species, or even separate genera. Darwin’s work actually demonstrates how the intense selection pressures after the Flood could have acted on gene pools rich in variety to allow rapid speciation/adaptive radiation from the restricted number of land-dwelling kinds represented on the Ark. The variability built into each created kind thus allowed post-Flood populations to respond to changing environmental pressures (adapt) and thus conserve the kinds." AIG
.....and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1:21
