On Monday, May 10, 2004, at 10:59 AM, Wally Day wrote:

>  A couple days ago I witnessed
> (not in the religious sense :) a mother duck and her brood crossing a
> very
> busy six-lane highway. I was sure she and her brood were done for. To
> my
> surprise, she was able to maneuver the brood completely accross the
> highway, without fear, stopping at all the correct spots

I have seen this same thing, with feral cats in my neighborhood. A
mother cat had a litter one yard from a busy street. Somehow not one of
those kittens got caught by traffic. Now six years later that mother
cat still lives there, and I see some of her brood around. Never yet
seen a dead cat on the street here.

But this is at best an example of micro-evolution, a minor change in
old 'predator-prey' strategies. No new species of cat is likely to
emerge from this. Every species has a stock of genes, not all held by
every member. Minor variations in the frequency of these genes is
evolution only in the broadest sense.