Okay all, as tempting as this whole creationism vs. evolution debate is, I'm going to bite my tongue and try to focus.
(there was no tongue biting smiley)
Anyway, the domestication of species *can* take place in a very very short period of time. There was a very famous study done in Russia where there was an attempt to domesticate foxes for the fur industry. After a mere 40 years of selective breeding for calmness, not only the behaviour of the foxes changed, their physiology had changed as well. They had floppy ears, shorter muzzles, their coats had gone from red or silver to black and white spotted. They behaved like puppies their whole lives and bonded with their human keepers.
Now, this was really puzzling to the researchers because they had not been selecting for physical traits at all, and none of the traits that showed up were present in the parent stock. After looking into it and doing a bunch of experiments they determined the following:
The change in the foxes' appearance wasn't due to the genes for their appearance being different from a wild foxes "appearance genes". Because they had been breeding tamer foxes, they were producing foxes with less adrenalin, and their genes were for less adrenalin.
If a fox embryo from the domestic strain is supplemented adrenalin, the embryo develops into a normal wild type scaredy fox, with all the physical characteristics of a wild fox.
They concluded that the presence or absence of adrenaline during embryonic development has an enormous impact on the physical appearance and behaviour of the animal.
I have also seen some studies done with dogs and adrenalin supplementing the embryos. From what I remember, the resulting puppies were extremely wolf-like in both appearance and behaviour.
It would be really interesting to do experiments along a similar line with other domestic animals such as cattle and see if they come out looking and behaving like aurochs. From the results of the canine studies my guess is that they would. I am guessing that most, if not all, of our domesticated mammals are simply selectively bred counterparts of their wild cousins who just produce a lot less adrenalin.
I don't know if reptile embryos respond in the same way as a mammal embro does to adrenalin levels during development. My guess would be no, but I could be very wrong. My other guess is that since corns are partly very popular because they are so easy going anyway, is that they probably didn't have a very high adrenalin level to begin with, so we may not see any physical changes as time goes by, since there isn't a lot of alteration of behaviour going on here.
Plus, Santa has a very valid point about his cattle not having changed in 50 years. From what I have seen (being a heritage livestock freak) most domestic mammals haven't changed for the thousands of years they have been in captivity, unless humans caused that change deliberately with a very specific purpose in mind. Take greyhounds for example, they have looked the same since the time of the ancient egyptians. We have no documentation of them ever having been a wolf, or wild, and there are no documented intermediary stages, either in paintings or in actual physical remains. If it actually did take thousands of years to domesticate an animal, we would have found fossil evidence of them in their intermediary stages when we excavate really early human settlements.
Here are some links to the domestic fox experiment of anyone is interested.
http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/jsk/canid.htm
http://www.devbio.com/article.php?ch=23&id=223
The second one has photos of the foxes. You can see what a huge difference in appearance there is after just 40 years of selection.
Pretty wild stuff, that's awesome, I never heard of that study before. I think it does a good job of showing the effects of domestication, but like you said, corns are not mammals and are pretty easygoing anyway so it'd be hard to tell if captivity has had an effect on them like the one above. I just glanced over that webpage (I've been studying for my molecular bio exam all night so my brain is shot 
...but I'll read it in the morning...lol), so it may have mentioned this and I just didn't see it. Can the domesticated foxes still breed with wild ones and produce viable offspring? I'm assuming they can, because I don't see how there could be that much of a change over that short of a time. If so, I think that is a good answer to the original post on this thread. There can be a huge amount of phenotypic difference and still not be a new species. I'm interested to see what some of the long-time corn breeders have to say about this, whether they have any experiences that could show evidence like that study described. I'm new with corns obviously, but non-hybrid matings have only led to differences in color/pattern, right? I don't remember ever seeing anything about major physiological differences from wild counterparts in the offspring, but I could be wrong.
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