@farmerman,
farmerman wrote: If artificial selection can change a phenotype and certainly a genotype, why is this IMPOSSIBLE in nature??
Because artificial selection is based on intelligence (our own intelligence ... I hope you are not going to deny it).
Everything in the artificial selection is based on intelligence - the controlled environment in the lab, the pre-designed genotype, the selection of the seeds, the selection of the hybrids afterwords ... everything, without any exception.
FM, you are changing the assumptions of the experiment.
For the natural selection to be valid on the basis of the results observed with artificial selection you will need the source of the mapping - the prototype of our intelligence (God or other ILFs ... or string theory (the Mind of God as the physicists call it) ... or whatever), but you will need prototype ... or in the alternative case you have to prove that the intelligence can emerge out of nothing and by some accident. Where is the proof of this?
The evidence you are trying to present is called inference by analogy. You make the artificial selection tests and on the grounds of them & their results you infer what the natural selection might be happening in the same way ... but you are missing the point - the mapping of our intelligence into the controlled environment of the artificial selection from its 'primary image' with the natural selection.
You have invalid mapping in order to make the said inference by analogy. Hence your inference is invalid, for it fails the validation tests.
From where automatically follows that you cannot use artificial selection as an evidence for and as an example of natural selection.