[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

I think the dotted lines should be enough proof for anyone that a putative ancestor of whales and hippos had a common ancestor that crawled out the sea and then some of the descendants of that ancestor crawled back into the sea

Sure, that's proof enough. Actually, a little Mayr-esque narrative about whales is ironclad, like this old yarn from Darwin himself:

In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.

It doesn't matter if it's bears or hippos or camels. All you have to do is prefix "I can see no difficulty" or "I can readily imagine that", and presto, there's proof of evolution. A few years ago some evolutionists were saying that camels are the closest relatives of whales. I can see no difficulty in imagining camels as a dry sort of whale, and I can readily imagine whales to be camels who yearned to take to the waves, and so on.

There's a book that compiles Darwin's use of such convincing prefix phrases, among other things: Articles of the Darwin Faith

[count-your-change]

Darwin must have been very sensitive to bad PR since most of the comment was struck from later editions though Darwin certainly hadn’t changed his mind.

Maybe someone asked just what kind of whale fed on airborne insects.

Thanks for the link!