Shedding Dark on Whale Evolution

Darwin-worshiping biologists brag about shedding light on evolution
but it is only black light that makes their imaginations glow

The Genesis record says that God made “great sea creatures” on Day 5 of creation week (Genesis 1:21). Presumably this included whales. Today’s evolutionary biologists long ago tossed out Genesis as a silly creation myth of ancient people who didn’t know science. So they invented silly creation myths of their own, one being that great whales descended from a four-legged land animal. Darwin thought it was a bear. Today’s consensus compares it to a wolf with a long snout. This story, said to be supported by fossils from Pakistan, is touted as one of the prime evidences for “great transformations” over millions of Darwin Years.

The fossil props they celebrate for this transition do not hold up under scrutiny (see this video, then Rebuttal 1 and Rebuttal 2 responding to criticisms). Genetically, it is impossible anyway. In his book Zombie Science (see also this article at Evolution News), Jonathan Wells says that thousands of beneficial mutations would be required to turn a land animal into an obligate swimmer. A whale has to perform everything underwater, including reproduction, locomotion, feeding, and sensing. The nasal passages had to move to the top of the head, and include new echolocation equipment. The feet had to become flippers. All the senses had to be overhauled. It’s a mind-boggling change!

How many coordinated changes would that take? In the film Living Waters, Dr Richard Sternberg calculates that the probability to get two coordinated beneficial mutations (just two) would vastly exceed the time available between the putative ancestor and a modern whale. Little wonder that Wells calls whale evolution a fairy tale. Nevertheless, it is a fairy tale that the totalitarian Darwin Empire requires students to learn, because they cannot allow a divine foot in the door. They have to invent just-so stories because of their prior commitment to materialism.

The Story Goes On

Now how did that get up there? New study sheds light on development and evolution of dolphin, whale blowholes (University of Washington). Press office writer James Urton at UW boasts that his university’s scientists are figuring out how a whale’s nasal passages moved to the top of the head to become blowholes. He presents a variation of Recapitulation Theory in which whale embryos seem to relive their evolutionary past. UW grad student Rachel Roston and her Duke University adviser V. Louise Roth ran divination on 21 whale embryos at museums, looking for evolution. They think they saw nasal passages migrating during development from parallel to vertical orientations. These changes, they say, occurred differently in toothed whales and in baleen whales.

“I’m struck by two interesting discoveries that emerged from this work,” said Roth. “Although they both develop blowholes, there are key differences between a baleen and a toothed whale in how they reorient their nasal passages during development. Moreover, surprisingly, accompanying the processes of developing upwardly oriented nostrils there are profound changes within the braincase.”

They admit at this stage that they only have a hypothesis. They will need to examine more whale fetuses for the divination images to come into sharper focus.

“This model gives us a hypothesis for the developmental steps that had to occur to make that anatomical transformation happen, and will serve as a point of comparison for additional studies of growth and development in whales, dolphins and porpoises,” said Roston.

Keep that funding coming. Incidentally, Duke U and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded this work – yes, that NIH; you know, the one in turmoil over conflicts of interest regarding their funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.

Did whales evolve from small land mammals? With evolutionary imagination, anything is possible. Illustration courtesy Illustra Media.

Two groups of whales evolved massive heads for different reasons (Jake Buehler at New Scientist). Jake starts off on the wrong flipper right in his headline. Things do not evolve for reasons in Darwinism! Stuff just happens. Evolution is unguided and purposeless, remember? A high perhapsimaybecouldness index—the mark of Darwin storytelling—begins in the first paragraph.

Bowhead and right whales are among the biggest animals alive today, but a new look at how they evolved suggests that these two closely related groups ballooned in size independently, and probably for different reasons.

Because Darwinists are bigots, they can ask without shame about “how they evolved” instead of “whether they evolved.” No other option can be entertained; no debate is needed. The question is, did stuff happen this way, or did stuff happen that way?

“Balaenids are fundamental [ecological] players that shape the energy flow in the ocean ecosystems,” says [Michaelangelo] Bisconti [University of Turin, Italy], so understanding how they evolved is crucial for unravelling ocean prehistory.

Now, he and his colleagues have analysed the proportions of living and fossil balaenid whale species, estimating and mapping changes in size and shape to different time points in their evolutionary history and ancient environmental changes.

The plankton did it! No, the Arctic cold did it! The two groups of whales received their big heads for different “reasons.” Keep score of the perhapsimaybecouldness words as you read:

The team found that right whales (Eubalaena) expanded first – to more than 14 metres long – about 6 million years ago, possibly as a result of a new influx of stable plankton food in their environment. But bowheads (Balaena) grew large a few million years later, possibly as an adaptation to the Arctic habitat, which cooled considerably 3 million years ago.

The findings show that some baleen whales may have evolved extreme sizes due to differing environmental pressures, even among closely related species.

To Darwinists, that’s enough guesswork to write a scientific paper on, show the funding agencies, and get the Media Relations Office to write up a nice press release boasting about the university’s use of the money. What they failed to consider, though, is an important part of the scientific method. Where is the control group? If it is a law of nature that environmental pressures cause massive heads, why didn’t that happen in other animals within the same ecosystem, including other whales and dolphins?

Notable in the last paragraph is an admission of missing fossils. But that’s OK; Darwin’s bases are covered. Whatever turns up will “shed further light on evolution.”

…there is a big gap in the balaenid fossil record between 7 and 20 million years ago.

“If you were to find a fossil now that’s say, 10 or 12 million years old, it could change that whole story,” says Marx. Bisconti says he is hopeful that such fossils of these odd whales will turn up, shedding further light on their evolution.

Humpback breach, from Living Waters (Illustra Media).

Whales are among the most majestic and magnificent animals God ever created. But contemporary materialistic science robs Him of credit for them, because evolutionary biologists have set up idols of Darwin in their hearts. Instead of seeing whales under the sunshine of God’s creative intelligence, they carouse under black light that makes their imaginations glow. It gives them a high, like the hallucinogenic drug LSD (Let’s Serve Darwin).