ICR article image.
Posted on 03/08/2016 10:42:26 AM PST by fishtank
Major Evolutionary Blunders: Are Whales and Evolution Joined at the Hip?
by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D. *
Evidence for Creation
National Geographic has a Little Kids First Big Book of… series on different topics. In its Little Kids First Big Book of Animals, pictures show giraffes, camels, bears, and whales.1 Young readers can see they all look different. Animals that live on land, like bears, have legs. But no one has seen a whale with legs. However, upon closer look, bears and whales do have some of the same traits. They both give birth to live young and nurse their offspring. Some whales also have hair in particular places on their body. These similar traits mean that both bears and whales are mammals. Some land mammals swim in the water a lot. What would happen if one type started to live more in the water than on land? Would its front legs slowly change to flippers like a whale has? Would its back legs gradually disappear? Is it possible that over a long time one kind of land animal could even become a whale?
(Excerpt) Read more at icr.org ...
ICR article image.
Whales have hips?
ICR is a great resource!
Not a blunder. There are adaptations that are just “good enough.”
For what?
I have been trying to find that one for a long time! Thanks!
Google image search “BC clams got legs”.
I miss the whale oil lamps.
I think this is the site that had the computer generated movie depicting flagellum assembly a while back.
It was pretty cool.
Many (though not all) whale species have vestigial hind legs buried inside their bodies. In some it’s little more than a pair of floating bones, but in some there is actual structure (femur, knee joint etc).
If you were to take a Chevrolet Corvette built in 1954 and decide you want to make a Nautilus Class submarine out of the thing, [and] give it to a lot of engineers – “Fellas, go do this. Do it for me” – I think it could be done, but we all have a sense of the engineering complexities. To do it would be a big, big, big project. The question I’d like to ask in all of this is: give me a quantitative estimate of how many steps would be required to change that Chevrolet Corvette built in 1954 to a Nautilus Class submarine? I don’t want you to give me a quantitatively precise answer, but I want you to give me a ballpark estimate – say, it’s off by an order of magnitude from what I’m told. And I think if we were talking about Chevrolet Corvettes and Nautilus class submarines, the answer would ballpark be: 50,000 changes, 60,000 changes, maybe 100,000 changes, if it’s feasible at all. I kind of suspect it could be done.Now, I want the same answer for the transition from a land-dwelling creature to a sea-dwelling creature. How many changes would we need? Now why would I be interested in that number? Let’s call that number the “X” number. And this is the point that the Darwinian community never finds curious. If we knew that number, which is an accessible number – we know enough biology to grasp that number – we could compare it to the fossil record. The fossil record has about ten intermediate fossils between a land-dwelling creature and an ocean-going whale. If there are ten, let’s say the tides of time have buried another hundred – perfectly plausible. But if there are 50,000 required changes, there should also be 50,000 intermediates, according to standard Darwinian doctrine. If there is an inequality, a strong inequality between those numbers – the number of fossils that we observe, padded with the number of fossils we might have observed were it not for the injuries of time, and the number of changes – morphological, cellular, biological, physiological, anatomical – that are required to make that transition, then we could assess the plausibility of what is one of the most interesting Darwinian sequences in the record. That’s never done. That’s just never done. No Darwinian paleontologist has ever said: “We expect there to be 50,000 sequences in the whale transition sequence, because we’ve computed the number of changes that are required. But wouldn’t you think, Darwinian fellow-seekers, that that’s an obvious first step to take in making your scientific claims quantitative – not rigorously quantitative, but ballpark quantitative? It’s not done.
-Dr. David Berlinski
To complicate the car to submarine analogy regarding evolution, with each change the resulting ‘vehicle’ must still be operational and useful. A few of these changes would need to include:
I’m not sure I want to google that.
ICR is deranged, an embarrassment to creation adherents.
All they do is find minuscule points that don’t make complete sense at first glance, then declare “THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE, NEVER HAS AND NEVER WILL, WE KNOW EVERYTHING POSSIBLE ABOUT IT, THEREFORE GOD. And evolutionists are stupid.” Simply ignoring inconvenient obvious objective facts, at best explaining them away by convenient albeit vague correlations with remotely comparable physical processes, is not science nor research.
Do I believen in creation a la Genesis? yes. I also think that a couple of pages spanning the totality of going from nothing to the universe as we know it, in terms understandable to a goat herder, is going to be a little short on objective cosmological details. Additionally, and in the faithful spirit of “the heavens declare His handiwork”, one merely need look up at night and apply simple rational thought to conclude that (given the speed of light) the totality of creation as we see it simply doesn’t fit in a universe no older than 100 hundred-year lifespans (to wit: you can’t reconcile the obvious scale of what we see, with the notion that it all had merely 10,000 years for ALL that light to get here). If all that doesn’t quite add up, you admit “it doesn’t add up based on these axioms” and proceed to investigate further - _not_, as ICR does, insult everything that doesn’t fit and explain the unknown with “because God.”
None. It you start with an amphibian. They exist in both forms at some time in their life cycle.
Your argument is flawed in that it suggests that a creature must be either completely sea-dwelling or completely land-dwelling.
Estimate the number of individual creatures which have existed.
Estimate the odds of mutation per creature.
Figure the number of mutations per second, spread over the figured time which creatures have existed.
Realize that some changes go together (ex.: _we_ might not see a connection between hair color and baleen sheet length, but the objective biology might).
Realize that some changes can phase in thru sensible intermediary steps (ex.: somewhere is a good diagram sensibly showing the transition from a mutated light-sensitive cell cluster to full-function eyeball).
Yes, we lack good explanation for why there’s so little “transition” evidence in the fossil record. Nonetheless, we DO have a fossil record, showing a bewildering array of animal species which plainly came into existence, got along nicely for a long time, then went extinct. Maybe we don’t understand some key transition physiology involved, true; the fact that we don’t understand doesn’t mean it isn’t there, and doesn’t mean it all sprang into completed existence (including a puzzling & inert vast collection of evidence for creatures that never actually existed) a very mere 10,000 years ago.
I’ve studied the math behind DNA and “chaos” (aka fractals) to the point that I’m not troubled with emergent complexity originating from small changes in simple finite structures. I’m increasingly inclined to think that some of the “just discovered” species around the world are, in fact, modern evolutionary steps (they exist now, but there’s no particular evidence for them having been around in the reasonably recent past). Humans are pretty good at staring at the obvious and not seeing it.
About some 50 million years ago whales evolved from hoofed mammals and became marine animals. This happened very fast. It took only about 8 million years (This is fast for evolution). Now, just last year scientist have found fossils of animals that roamed the land that is now Pakistan about 50 million years ago. These animals looked a little bit like wolves but they were land-living, four legged whales. These animals are now thought to be true whales ancestors on land.
Source - http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=47
I’m quite OK with God creating light. It’s kind of a significant aspect of God and “Let there be light” comes really early in creation. Therefore creating a galaxy or two and the light they emit is no problem. So I’m still believing the bible and that the universe is 6000 years old.
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