[ideonexus]

This principle is also why creationists don't understand how the world around us seems so engineered for us. That's because it was engineered... by our ancestors. The peach is a great example of this. Peaches didn't exist 3,000 years ago, but were engineered from a bitter, mostly-pit fruit through artificial selection into what we enjoy today. The same is true of corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cows, chickens, and so many other agricultural products. These things never existed in nature, we engineered them, but we just see the end result.

A fascinating aspect of this I learned about recently was the importance of fire to human development. I always imagined this tool in the context of humans huddled around a campfire for warmth and cooking, but our ancestors actually applied it on a much more epic scale. They burned down entire forests to create open fields where predators couldn't hide and where they could forage for well-cooked critters amid the ashes. Everywhere we migrated, we geoengineered forests into savannas.