"But has Rabbi Shafran applied his professed "critical thinking" to the alternate understanding of life's development that is taught in his circles? Does he really think that the available physical evidence better supports the notion that whales were created independently, with striking internal similarities to terrestrial mammals, and an inability to breathe underwater like fish, and following a whole chain of extinct creatures that were progressively less terrestrial, rather than indicating that they are actually descended from terrestrial mammals?"
[R. Slifkin, July 21, 2015]What does it take, in an engineering sense, to transform a car into a submarine? Quite a bit. And quite a bit of intelligence.
The same is true of transforming a land based mammal like a cow into a whale. There is very little (if any) hard scientific evidence for whale evolution. At least not through apparently unguided processes such as random mutation and natural selection.
Does R. Slifkin really have actual evidence that that whales evolved from a land animal in a few million years? Other than fanciful drawings with only a few so-called "transitional" fossils?
In the drawing, on the left, is the supposed sequence of transitional fossils from a fully terrestrial animal (like a cow) at the bottom -- to a fully aquatic whale at the top -- in about 10 million years on the evolutionary time scale.
On the right -- is a recent fossil find showing a fully aquatic whale in just the wrong place in the sequence.
Argentine paleontologist Marcelo Reguero, who led a joint Argentine-Swedish team, said the fossilized archaeocete jawbone found in February dates back 49 million years. In evolutionary terms, that's not far off from the fossils of even older proto-whales from 53 million years ago that have been found in South Asia and other warmer latitudes.
Those earlier proto-whales were amphibians, able to live on land as well as sea. This jawbone, in contrast, belongs to the Basilosauridae group of fully aquatic whales, said Reguero, who leads research for the Argentine Antarctic Institute.
"The relevance of this discovery is that it's the oldest known completely aquatic whale found yet," said Reguero, who shared the discovery with Argentine paleontologist Claudia Tambussi and Swedish paleontologists Thomas Mors and Jonas Hagstrom of the Natural History Museum in Stockholm.
[Oct. 2011, www.nbcnews.com. The handout drawing on the right is released by the Argentine Direccion Nacional del Antartico shows an artist`s rendition of an Antartic Archaeocetes, after fossils of the creature were found at the La Meseta formation, near the Marambio Base in the Argentine-run area of the Antarctica.]Until now, the whale series went something like this:
Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 myaNow the timeline looks something like this:
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya
Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 myaThe fossil record now might jump from fully terrestrial Pakicetids to fully aquatic whales in just a couple million years -- maybe much less than 5 million years [at least according to the shaky dating systems of evolutionists]. In fact, if this find has been correctly identified, then fully aquatic whales might have existed before many of their alleged semi-aquatic evolutionary precursors.[1]
New Fossil Jawbone (fully aquatic whale): 49 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya
Now I think it is pretty amazing that evolutionists can reconstruct a whole whale from a jaw-bone. But they do this kind of thing all the time. Below is a reconstruction of an important "transitional fossil" in R. Slifkin's fossil sequence.
From a few fossils like a skull and a pelvis, Wikipedia shows a fanciful reconstruction of Rodhocetus. Rodhocetus is claimed to be a semi-aquatic mammal developing flippers and a whale-like tail. However there is no fossil evidence for these whale-like properties. I have superimposed red stars on the critical parts that are missing from the actual fossil evidence.
As Richard Sternberg and others have argued, there are quite a few changes that have to appear in just a few million years in going from a land mammal to a whale [2]:
- Counter-current heat exchanger for intra-abdominal testes
- Ball vertebra
- Tail flukes and musculature
- Blubber for temperature insulation
- Ability to drink sea water (reorganization of kidney tissues)
- Reverse orientation of fetus in the uterus
- Nurse young underwater (modified mammal)
- Forelimbs transformed into flippers
- Reduction of hind limbs
- Reduction/loss of pelvis and sacral vertebrae
- Reorganization of the musculature for the reproductive organs
- Hydrodynamic properties of the skin
- Special lung surfactants
- Novel muscle systems for the blowhole
- Modification of the teeth
- Modification of the eye for underwater vision
- Emergence of expansion of the mandibular fat bad with complex lipid distribution (the fat pad has acoustic properties)
- Reorganization of skull bone
- Modification of the ear bones
- Decoupling of esophagus and trachea
- Synthesis and metabolism of isovaleric acid (toxic to terrestrial mammals)
- Emergence of blowhole musculature and their neurological control
New genes and proteins would have to be adapted or "invented" along the way. To form even a few proteins is well beyond the probabilistic resources of life on earth or the even the universe, even at billions of years proposed in evolutionary time scales. All the changes would have to be co-ordinated to develop a new body plan.
In fact, evolutionist do not even have a single detailed Darwinian pathway that could account for even one of the significant morphological changes needed to convert this speculation of whale evolution into serious science.
Here is a video of the incorrigible Dr. Berlinksi that evolutionist love to hate:
[2] http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/10/discovery_of_oldest_fully_aqua052021.html
