Today I would like to talk about whales. Earth is a water planet, and 71 percent of earth’s surface is covered by the ocean. This global ocean has incredible variety of organisms: fish, coral reefs, sharks, skates, rays, sea turtles, seahorses, snakes, sea lions and whales.
Whales are amazing animals. The blue whale is the largest animal of all time. Weighing 30 tons and measuring almost 100 feet, it is the largest known animal to have ever existed.
When I went to Alaska, one day I was walking by the sea in Anchorage. Many tourists come to Alaska to watch whales. The temperature outside was below 30 degrees. I wondered how the whales could survive such low temperatures. Whales are fascinating creatures. No wonder millions of children and adults go to different places around the world just for whale watching. From Moby-Dick to Life of Pi, whale stories captivated millions of readers. One of the most wonderful books in the world, Moby-Dick is about a whale which bite off Captain Ahab’s leg at the knee when he went on a whaling voyage. In the Bible, we read about Jonah swallowed by a whale. When we go through testing times in our life, we describe them as ‘belly of the whale experiences’. Whales are in astrology. Cetus stands for the sea monster.
Before the invention of electricity, people relied on whale oil to light their lamps. The vikings traded for whale bones. In ancient world, whales were the symbol of sea power. During Peloponnesian wars, there was a stalemate between Sparta and Athens. Sparta was supreme on the land while Athens at the sea. One historian has described this deadlock like an elephant at war with a whale. So, whale is the king of the ocean. Don’t mess with a whale when you go to the ocean.
The natural history of the whales is a very interesting scientific discussion. The halls of natural history museums feature the skeletons of whales. Paleontologists have been discovering great wealth of whale fossils around the world. In 2011, a whale fossil site was discovered in Chile, in the Atacama Desert. It preserved the skeletons of more than forty whales. The Smithsonian Institution has developed a 3D gallery of these whale fossils. Please check them out when you get some time, they have these beautiful 3D models of whale fossils.
Classification: In the scientific classification, whales belong to class Mammalia, Order Artiodactyla and Infraorder Cetacea. Many animals have hooves on their toes. A hoof is the tip of a toe of an ungulate mammal. It has a keratin covering giving strength to the animal as it walks. Many of the hoofed animals we see around us today can be classified by the number of toes they have: Perissodactyls and Artiodactyls. Perissodactyls have an odd number of toes. Examples include horses, rhinoceros and tapirs. Artiodactyls are even-toed, they have even number of digits on each foot. Even-toed hoofed mammals include cattle, giraffe, deer, sheep, moose, camel, hippopotamus, goat, pig, llama, bison etc. According to evolutionists, hippos are the closest living relatives to whales. In the words of Richard Dawkins, a whale is what a hippo would be if it didn’t have to deal with gravity on land.
Whales are mammals because they have mammary glands, they nurse their young with milk secreted from the mammary glands, they have hair, three middle ear bones, they give birth to live young, usually just one baby at a time, they nourish their babies with milk. A baby humpback whale drinks 130 gallons of milk each day. Imagine that for a moment, drinking 130 gallons of milk every day.
Whales are divided into two main groups: Toothed whales and Baleen whales. Evolutionists say that around 34 million years ago, they separated from a common ancestor. Toothed whales, as you can guess, are characterized by having teeth. They have a single blowhole. Sperm whales, beaked whales, dolphins, porpoises come under toothed whales. They produce clicks at various sound frequencies and use echolocation to locate their prey. Toothed whales widely vary in their size, from 4.5 foot vaquita to 66 feet sperm whale. Beluga whales: they are cute little all-white whales.
Narwhal whales: When I first saw the images of a narwhal whale, I thought, is this for real? With 10 foot long tusks, they look almost mystical. They might be the reason behind unicorn myths.
Baleen whales are characterized by baleen plates and two blowholes. Baleen plates are made up of keratin. Keratin is found in our fingernails and hair. So, baleen plates are strong structures. They create a unique filter-feeder system inside the mouths of baleen whales. The whale opens its mouth, takes in lot of water, then pushes the water out through baleen plates. As the water moves out across the plates, animals like krill and fish are retained inside the mouth of the whale.
Baleen whales are larger than the toothed whales. They include blue whales, humpback whales, bowhead whales. Blue whales are the largest animals known to have ever existed. Their skull itself measures 19 feet in length. Humpbacks are found in all of the world’s oceans, they grow to be more than 50 feet long and weigh up to 80,000 pounds. They feed on vast quantities of krill and use their large baleen plates to filter out their prey from the sea. Humpback males communicate through songs, often singing for more than 15 minutes.
Bowheads have a bow-shaped mouths. They live up to 200 years. Many scientists have been studying them to understand the secrets of longevity.
Anatomy: A whale is an anatomical marvel. Once in awhile, a National Geographic photographer goes for an undersea exploration, and gives us a glimpse of a human in comparison to a whale: a 6 feet human trailing a 100 feet whale. Who said there was not enough space for Jonah inside the belly of a whale?
Whales are warm-blooded, they have a blubber, which is a layer of fat under the skin. Whales live in very cold water and this blubber help them stay warm.
They have flippers. The whales glides through the water using these flippers.
They are mammals, so they have lungs. They fill their lungs using blowholes, which are located on top of their heads. Whales breath in and expel air through these blow holes. A sperm whale can stay underwater for up to one and half hour after taking air in.
They have a heart with four chambers. They do not have external ears, but tiny ear openings which transmit sound to the middle ear. They receive the sounds in lower jaw. Whales have a great sense of hearing and can tell the direction of sound underwater.
They have a spinal column made up of vertebrae.
Flukes? Tail?
Evolutionary view of whales: The September 2001 cover story of Nature is titled, ‘When whales walked the earth’. That title summarizes the evolutionary view of the whales. The ancestors of whales were land mammals. Tetrapods, mammals with four limbs became whales. Evolutionists theorized how each organ of a land mammal transformed into different structures of a whale. A land mammal has a pelvis attached to a backbone, a spine with vertebrae, a rib cage to protect lungs, nostrils for breathing and limbs with five digits at the end. These structures of a land mammal had evolved into respective organs of a whale. Evolutionist Jerry Coyne says, ‘whales are stretched-out land animals whose forelimbs have become paddles and whose nostrils have moved atop their head’.
So, forelimbs became flippers
nostrils migrated to the top of the skull and became blowholes
hindlimbs shrunk.
In 1859, Charles Darwin speculated that bears evolved into whales.
In the 1960s, evolutionary biologist from the University of Chicago Leigh Van Valen theorized that whales descended from mesonychians, which were land-dwelling, hoofed mammals that lived 35 to 40 million years ago. Now they believe they evolved from artiodactyls, which are even-toed, hoofed mammals. They believe the closest living relatives of whales are the hippopotamuses. Whale and hippos share a common ancestor that lived 60 million years ago.
This idea is not entirely recent. Ernst Haeckel was a German evolutionist whose life was between 1834 – 1919. Haeckel placed hippos as the sister group to the whales. He gave them the uncomplimentary name ‘Obesa’ and placed them in a small twig on the branch leading to Cetacea. Whales belong to Cetacea. So, Haeckel believed hippos and whales came from a common ancestor. (Richard Dawkins, Ancestor’s Tale)
Vestigial Organs: Evolutionists believe whales evolved from land animals, so, they say, whales have many vestigial organs as remnants or modifications of the organs once carried by their land dwelling ancestors. Evolutionist Jerry Coyne wrote, “Whales are treasure troves of vestigial organs. Many living species have a vestigial pelvis and leg bones, testifying…to their descent from four-legged terrestrial ancestors. If you look at a complete whale skeleton in a museum, you’ll often see the tiny hindlimb and pelvic bones hanging from the rest of the skeleton, suspended by wires. That’s because in living whales, they’re not connected to the rest of the bones, but are simply imbedded in tissue. They once were part of the skeleton, but became disconnected and tiny when they were no longer needed”
So, whales have a vestigial pelvis, a remnant of the pelvis once possessed by land mammals.
Flippers evolved from forelimbs. There are bones in the flippers homologous to bones in the forelimbs of land animals. Hipbones and hind limbs disappeared as land mammals became whales. Two lobed Flukes evolved from tail of the ancestors.
Timeline: Let us the timeline of whale evolution. Around 65 millions years ago, dinosaurs became extinct. 11 million year later, that is 54 million years ago, land mammals started to evolve into whales. This evolution happened in a region of the planet defined by the Tethys Sea. Tethys Sea formed when the supercontinent Pangea divided into two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana. On the shores of Tethys Sea, that is today’s Pakistan, India, and surrounding regions, some land mammals started to evolve into whales.
Fossils: What evidence do we have for this whale evolution? Evolutionists say there are transitional fossils. They take us to Pakistan to study these fossils. Let us see them one by one.
Pakicetus: Pakicetus is literally the whale from Pakistan. It was uncovered in Pakistan. It was discovered by paleontologist Philip Gingerich and colleagues in 1981. About 50 million years ago, Pakicetus is said to have lived on the shores of the Tethys Sea. The fossils had a skull with ear bones. It had a long snout. It had middle ear bones and ankle bones like artiodactyls. Evolutionists say pakicetus had thickened ear bones like those of a whale. They have a long snout with nostrils at the tip. Were these nostrils migrating to the top to become a blowhole of a whale? Evolutionists say this long snout resemble a whale-like head.
Ambulocetus: Ambulocetus means ‘the walking whale’. It was reported by Johannes Thewissen and colleagues in 1994. It was about 10 feet long from tip to tail and a little larger than Pakicetus. The fossils had a long snout, pointed teeth, strong jaw, short forelimbs and long hind limbs. The forelimbs had five fingers on each hand, hind limbs had four toes on each foot. So, it can walk like a land animal. It had a spine with vertebrae. It may have moved on land with up-and-down- motion. For evolutionists, motion reminds them of the up-and-down tail propulsion seen in today’s whales. Ambulocetus was moving from freshwater environments to oceans. Ambulocetus also had a large mandibular foramen. In whales, this area is filled with fat and transmits the sound to the inner ear. So, they called this fossil, Ambulocetus natans, literally the swimming, walking-whale.
Indohyus: It was discovered by Indian geologist A. Rango Rao in Kashmir, India. He found the rocks containing a few teeth and parts of a jawbone. The rocks were dated to 48 million years old. After the death of Rango Rao, his widow gave the rocks to Professor Thewissen. Indohyus was a cat sized mammal with a long snout and limbs.It is about 2 feet long. It is found in the Himalayas. It had long leg bones similar to mammals. Chemical analysis of its bones showed that they lived in water. Professor Thewissen recognized a ear structure in the jaw bone, the auditory bullae, the bones that surround the inner ear. This ear structure resemble the ear structures of whales. It also had thick bones which allowed it to stay underwater. So, the assumption goes, this must be a transitional fossil of a whale like creature.
Rodhocetus: It means ‘barely walking whale’. It was discovered in Balochistan, Pakistan and described by Philip Gingerich in 1994. The pelvis, vertebrae, and hind limb of Rodhocetus made it the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Robert Hazen wrote, ‘And then a more primitive whale, Rodhocetus, discovered in 1994 in Pakistani sediments about 46 million years old, has more exaggerated hind legs, not unlike those of a seal.’
In the hind legs of rodhocetus, Professor Hazen sees the hind legs of a marine creature, and these hind legs would disappear as whales evolve from Rodhocetus.
Basilosaurus means king lizard. Its fossils were found in the United States, Egypt and Jordan. It is described as the first completely aquatic whale. It was almost sixty feet in length and was one of the largest known animals to exist. It had 14 inch long hind limbs.
Professor Robert Hazen wrote, ‘Moving back in time, one such intermediate form is the 35-million-year-old Basilosaurus – a sleek, powerful, toothed whale. This creature has been known only for more than a century, but a recent discovery of an unusually complete specimen in Egypt for the first time included tiny, delicate vestigial hind leg bones. That’s a feature without obvious function in the whale, but such atrophied legs provide a direct link to four-limbed ancestral land mammals’.
Evolutionist Carl Zimmer wrote, “In 1989, Gingerich was mapping the spine of a well-preserved 50-foot-long skeleton of Basilosaurus, a fossil whale that lived about 10 million years after Pakicetus. Two-thirds of the way down the spine he found a small round bone standing vertically. This seemed out of place, and the top was weathered away. When the rest was excavated, the bone proved to be an upper leg bone with the knee joint preserved. No one had ever seen the knee of a whale before. (Carl Zimmer, Virus and Whale)
Wow, isn’t it so wonderful! A whale with legs and knee joints!
So excited was Stephen Jay Gould that he once said these findings, “the sweetest series of transitional fossils an evolutionist could ever hope to find”. So, Basilosaurus is described as a huge ocean-going whale and it also had legs with knee joints!
Evolutionists claim Basilosaurus and its descendants finally gave us modern whales.
Creationist View:
Having studied what evolutionists say about whales and their evolution, now, let us see what the Bible teaches about the whales. Genesis 1:21 says, ‘And God created great whales’. God specially created the whales just like He created human beings on Day 6 of Creation. If you read Genesis chapter 1 and 2, it is obvious that God created the universe with human beings in His mind. Creationists do not believe that whales descended from land mammals. They believe that God specially created the whales in the ocean. They include great biologists and paleontologists such as Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier, Richard Owen and Louis Agassiz. Linnaeus invented our modern system of scientific nomenclature. He rightly classified whales as mammals, but he believed in special creation of whales.
Nothing irritates a secular Darwinist like Richard Dawkins more than the view that human beings are the crown of creation. They propose the rise of humanity as a purposeless accident in the great drama of cosmic evolution. They say, man is nothing more than a mere twig on the great tree of evolution. Man came at the end, not at the beginning.
If you compress the 4.6 billion years of earth history to one year. Earth formed on January 1st, Life began on February 21st, Dinosaurs became extinct on December 25, whales came on December 26, and human beings came on December 31st, at 11:00 pm. So, human beings came at 11:00 pm on December 31st, almost at the final hours of evolution, as a blind accident out of purposeless mutations and aimless natural selection.
Not all evolutionists are atheists like Richard Dawkins. Robert Hazen is a scientist at George Mason University. In his book, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin, Mr.Hazen wrote these words, “I also see a deeper problem with intelligent design, which I believe trivializes God. Why do we have to invoke God every time we don’t have a complete scientific explanation? I am unpersuaded by a God who must be called upon to fill in the gaps of our ignorance – between a cow and a whale, for example. The problem with this view is that as we learn more, the gaps narrow. As paleontologists continue to unearth new intermediate transitional forms, God’s role is squeezed down to ever more trivial variations and inconsequential modifications.
Isn’t it more satisfying to believe in a God who created the whole shebang from the outset – a God of natural laws who stepped back and doesn’t meddle in our affairs? In the beginning God set the entire magnificent fabric of the universe into motion. Atoms and starts and cells and consciousness emerged inexorably, as did the intellect to discover laws of nature through a natural process of self-awareness and discovery. In such a universe, scientific study provides a glimpse of creator as well as creation’
So, according to Mr.Hazen, in the beginning God set the universe in motion and left. All the complexity in the universe came by itself without God’s special creation. He asks, a God of natural laws who stepped back and doesn’t meddle in our affairs? That is deistic materialism. For Richard Dawkins, it is atheistic materialism. No God, only materialistic evolution. For Richard Hazen, it is deistic materialism. God left, only materialistic evolution. He blurs the lines between science and materialism.
Let me read another passage from his book.
“Science is a slave to rigorous logic and inexorable continuity of argument. If life has changed over time, evolving from a single common ancestor to today’s biological diversity, then many specific predictions about intermediate life-forms must follow. For example, transitional forms between land mammals and whales must have existed sometime in the past.” (Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin, Robert M.Hazen)
Let us analyze this passage.
Let us take the first sentence: “Science is a slave to rigorous logic and inexorable continuity of argument’.
Then the second sentence: “If life has changed over time, evolving from a single common ancestor to today’s biological diversity…..”
We have no problem with first sentence, of course, science is a slave to rigorous logic and inexorable continuity of argument.
The second sentence, ‘life evolved from a single common ancestor to today’s biological diversity’, that is not science, that is a presupposition.
Intentionally or unintentionally, evolutionists jump from science to presuppositions, often in successive sentences, like Professor Hazen did in the above paragraph I quoted. All life evolved from a single common ancestor is as presuppositional as all life created from a single common Creator.
Evolutionists go out looking for fossils with a prior commitment to naturalism: All life evolved, there is no Creator God. They feed us atheism and naturalism using the cutlery of science.
All science is done with presuppositions. But it is wrong to equate our presuppositions with scientific method. Scientific method is applicable only to observational science, what can be reproduced in the present. You cannot apply scientific method to make categorical statements about things happened 50 million years ago. How did Mayan civilization disappear? The classic Maya existed between AD 250 to AD 900. In AD 900 it disappeared. How? It’s mystery. There are hundreds of theories put forth to explain the disappearance of Mayan Civilization. We are not sure what exactly happened to Mayan Civilization. That’s only 11 centuries ago. But, somehow, evolutionists claim they know what happened 50 million years ago.
They fail to recognize the ‘belief system’ underneath their fossil discoveries: No Creator God, all life evolved without purpose, without design.
Creationists start with a belief system: There is a Creator God. He specially designed all major kinds of living organisms. If life evolved from a common ancestor, you can make a prediction: there should be transitional fossils. If life was created by God, you can make some predictions: You can expect variations, You can expect adaptations, and you can expect design.
If Creationism is true, we can expect microevolution: Our genes have capacity to produce a wide range of variations in our offspring. Whales have 44 chromosomes. These 44 chromosomes have capacity to adopt and produce microevolution that created diverse groups of whales. From pygmy whale to blue whale, whales come in different sizes. This size range in whales is analogous to how dinosaurs ranged from the crow-sized Microraptor to long-necked sauropod dinosaurs that exceeded 50 tons.
If Creationism is true, we can expect altruism: The Bible says God is love. A loving God created us. A loving God created the animals. So, we can expect charity in God’s creation. Richard Dawkins wrote in his book Selfish Gene ‘Baby whales and injured individuals who cannot swim to the surface have been seen to be rescued and held up by companions in the school’. Altruism is contradictory to evolutionary worldview because in the wild it is all about the survival of the fittest. But altruism fits well with a Creationist worldview because a loving God created both animals and human beings.
If Creationism is true, we can expect great design: The Bible says God is a Creator with great wisdom. So, his creation must reflect great design and intelligence. That is what we see in the whales. They have a great design and intelligence. The whales have the largest brain mass of any animal on earth. Their larger brain size plays a role in their adaptation, cooperation, learning, and grieving. They have excellent auditory communication and echolocation. Some whales make song like sounds to communicate to other whales. They use sound to map the structure of their location. This is called echolocation. A great object-detection system using sound waves. Only in modern age, did scientists develop such technologies like Radar which use radio waves for object-detection. But, God put this great design in the whales thousands of years ago.
So, if creationism is true, we can expect great design in nature. That is what great scientists and biologists did for centuries. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723) was a great Dutch scientist. He did pioneering work in microscopy and justifiably, he is called ‘Father of Microbiology’. He designed microscopes and became the first person to examine microbes. Leeuwenhoek was a creationist. He believed that God specially created human beings and animals. He expected to see the design of God in organisms: the movements of bacteria, the wings of a bird, the head of a fly and the eye of a whale.
Evolutionists talk about homologous structures and analogous structures as evidence for evolution. Do you know these concepts were developed by Creationists to prove the designs of God in nature? Richard Owen was an English biologist and paleontologist. He openly criticized Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
He could be called the father of famous Natural History museum in London. He went around collecting fossils and studying them in detail. Around 1840s, he recognized certain basic forms underlying the structures of animals. He called them ‘homologies’ or homologous structures: Anatomically similar structures serving different functions in different species.
For example, a human’s hand, a bat’s wing, a whale’s paddle, a cat’s leg. If you dissect them and see the underlying bones, you will see bones in similar patterns – humerus, radius, ulna, wrist bones and five fingers. Same structure but different functions. When Richard Owen studied these homologies, he concluded they are the evidence of a Creator. A common designer put a common design for different purposes in different organisms.
Charles Darwin stole this idea of homologies from Richard Owen. Darwin said homologous structures prove those organisms have a common ancestor, not a common designer. Ever since, homologous structures have been portrayed as an evidence for evolution, not creation. But if you look closely, homologous structures make more sense in a Creationist view.
For example, let us talk about a fan. It has a central hub with radiating blades. General Electric took this design and put it for different purposes.
A fan to cool human body
A fan for ventilation
A fan for cooling vehicle engines
A fan for removing dust in a vacuum cleaner
A fan for drying
A fan for propelling an aircraft
A fan for winnowing to separate chaff from grain.
General Electric : One designer used one design of fan for different functions in different machines. So, homologous structures point us to a common designer, not common ancestor.
That is how Richard Owen understood them and he dedicated Natural History museum for the glory of God, our Creator, not for some blind, purposeless natural selection.
Owen searched for design and found it. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead wrote the book Principia Mathematica. Their ambition was to bring all mathematics to perfection. They said, a statement like a whale is big is a complicated fact. We require the knowledge and experience of real things to understand the complexity of a whale. If you don’t know physics of sound, aeronautics and chemistry, you won’t appreciate the complexity of a whale. But if you go with the knowledge of physics, chemistry, aeronautics and mathematics, you will appreciate the intricacy of the organism. Do you know today scientists who design submarines and aircraft study the whale design to improve their blueprints? There is a great design in the whales that inspires even brilliant engineers. (The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood)
If creationism is true, there should be a purpose for every organ:
Evolutionists say there are many vestigial organs in every organism, that they could not have been created by a Creator like God. Now, what in the world are vestigial organs? They are organs or behaviors in animals that have lost all or most of their original function through evolution. Let me read a passage from Jerry Coyne’s book Why Evolution is true,
‘A horse can be born with extra toes, a human baby with a tail. These sporadically expressed remnants of ancestral features are called atavisms…..The most famous genuine atavisms are probably the legs of whales. We’ve already learned that some species of whales retain vestigial pelvises and rear leg bones, but about one whale in five hundred is actually born with a rear leg that protrudes outside the body wall. These limbs show all degrees of refinement, with many of them clearly containing the major leg bones of terrestrial mammals-like femur, tibia, and fibula. Some even have feet and toes! Why do atavisms like this occur at all? Our best hypothesis is that they come from the reexpression of genes that were functional in ancestors but were silenced by natural selection and they were no longer needed. Yet these dormant genes can sometimes be reawakened when something goes awry in development. Whales still contain some genetic information for making legs – not perfect legs, since the information has degraded during the millions of years that it resided unused in the genome – but legs nonetheless. And that information is there because whales descended from fourlegged ancestors. Like the ubiquitous whale pelvis, the rare whale leg is evidence for evolution’
Jerry Coyne says whales have vestigial pelvises. The mighty whale once supported by pelvis? It’s like saying Boeing 747 was carried over a small car. The plane would crush the car immediately. The whale would crush the pelvis immediately if it ever had one. So, the theory that whales once had pelvises is irrational.
What about hind legs buried in the flesh of the whales? Are they vestigial? Latest research shows that these structures strengthen the whale’s reproductive organs during copulation. They are not hind legs, folks.
Also, analyze the concept of ‘useless organs’. Even if we agree if they are ‘useless now’, it does not threaten Creationism. I still have my high school books in my home. I just kept them as the sweet memories I had in the high school. You might say, ‘those books are useless’. They are useless in one sense, I don’t read them any more. But they still came into my life through design, through purpose, not through random accidents.
Let me use another illustration. Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters. These rocket boosters are used for primary propulsion during the spaceflights. They provide the thrust for the first two minutes of flight. After they burnout, they were jettisoned or just stay empty for the rest of the flight. Ten minutes into the flight, you might say they are useless now, but they were essential during the first two minutes. They were there be design, but by accident.
When I was in medical school, my professor used to say, ‘appendix is a vestigial organ. A useless remnant from our evolutionary ancestry’. Now, the latest medical research shows that appendix plays a protective function during the early years of life. Because of their commitment to naturalism and materialism, evolutionists have relegated many organs like appendix to ‘useless’ or ‘vestigial’ status. But latest research has proven them wrong.
If Creationism is true, we can expect unique features among organisms:
Whales have many unique features like blow holes on water echo-location, unique hearing systems with no opening to the exterior. Why don’t we see these features in fish and sharks? These unique features point us to a Creator.
If Creationism is true, there should not be any transitional fossils between mammals and whales.
You might say, what about all the transitional fossils which have been dug out in the last few decades. Let us look at a few.
Pakicetus : First Pakicetus. The original fossil consisted only of jaw and skull fragments. They were found in the freshwater sediments, not the seas. They had large chewing muscles unlike cetaceans who don’t chew at all. They had no underwater hearing, unlike whales which have excellent hearing. If you look at the fossil finds, you see a few bone chips. Evolutionists put lot of their imagination over these bone chips to link them to whales. Pakicetus…the whale from Pakistan. You can see their bias in the name they gave it. Pakicetus remains indicate that animal was a land dwelling mammal, but at all connected to whale evolution.
Ambulocetus
Let’s look at Ambulocetus. This fossil had a long snout, pointed teeth, strong jaw, short forelimbs and long hind limbs. The forelimbs had five fingers on each hand, hind limbs had four toes on each foot. It had a spine with vertebrae. So, it looks like a land-dwelling creature. But evolutionists put their imagination on the fossils of this mammal and called it a ‘walking whale’. Ambulocetus literally means a walking whale.
Evolutionist Bill Nye wrote, ‘In the 1990s, a group of fossil hunters found the remains of a whale that once walked. No kidding. Ambulocetus (walking whale) fossils were discovered in what is now Pakistan. It is an animal that has whalelike flippers, and feet with toes.’
Bill Nye says, this fossil is a walking whale. No kidding. In fact, there is lot of kidding going on here. Let us listen to his explanation. He wrote, ‘Ambulocetus have roamed the shallow, where, judging by its teeth, it ate other animals. Through chemical analysis of those teeth, investigators have determined that ambulocetus was able to make the transition from salty water to freshwater. They lived in the estuaries, where rivers meet the seas. They probably had no trouble finding food in these nominally productive areas. And they had hair, enough of it to be apparent in their fossils. These animals evolved into our modern whales. They had both half a flipper and half a hoof. You can be certain that they made outstanding use of both’
They had both half a flipper and half a hoof? The fossils show no flippers. That came from Bill Nye’s imagination. You can be certain that they made outstanding use of both. Even Richard Dawkins says we should not so certain. Let us see what Richard Dawkins wrote in his book,
‘The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, ‘It is tempting – and older books used to do this – to draw sequences of fossils with arrows from older to young ones. But nobody can say, for example, that Ambulocetus was descended from Pakicetus. Or that Basilosaurus was descended from Rodhocetus. Instead, the diagram follows the more cautious policy of suggesting that, for example, whales are descended from a contemporary cousin of Ambulocetus which was probably rather like Ambulocetus (and might even have been Ambulocetus). The fossils shown are representative of various stages of whale evolution. The gradual disappearance of the hind limbs, the transformation of the front limbs from walking legs to swimming fins, and the flattening of the tail into flukes, are among the changes that emerged in elegant cascade.’
Evolutionists draw elegant diagrams in their textbooks, with arrows from Pakicetus to Ambulocetus to Rodhocetus to Whale. Richard Dawkins says that is not right because we are talking about things happened 50 million years ago. We should not talk like we actually observed those things.
Who saw the front limbs becoming fins?
Who saw the hind limbs disappearing?
Who saw tail becoming flukes?
Who saw ventral nostrils becoming dorsal blowholes?
Russian paleontologist G.A.Mchelidze holds that Pakicetus and Ambulocetus are actually isolated groups. Berkeley paleontologist Kevin Padian says that all of the fossils in the whale series have ‘distinguishing characteristics’. They would have to lose those distinguishing characteristics to become ancestors of whales. (quoted in The Design of life, William Dembski)
There is no fossil evidence that they lost their unique features to become whale like creatures.
Look at those names evolutionists gave to these fossil bones.
Pakicetus…whale from Pakistan
Ambulocetus…walking whale
Maiacetus…Mother whale
This is nothing but presumptuous and preposterous.
Alan Haywood wrote: “…..A land mammal that was in the process of becoming a whale would fall between two stools – it would not be fitted for life on land or sea, and would have no hope of survival.”
Mermaids can survive in folktales. They can not survive in real world.
Cyclical argument: Evolutionists often use cyclical arguments to support molecules to man evolution. It goes like this:
Transitional fossils must exist because life evolved;
Life evolved because transitional fossils exist.
I call this cyclical argument ‘Ipad fallacy’. Imagine this world without human beings. Some aliens came to visit us. They went into a house. They found an iphone in the living room. Then they walked into kitchen. They found an Imac on the kitchen table. They started to wonder, ‘Iphone and Imac’. How did they develop? One of them said, ‘Imac evolved from iphone’. Everyone looked at him. Then he said, ‘I looked at iphone and imac. I found lot of similarities between them. According to my theory of evolution, after millions of years of evolution, imac arose from iphone or iphone like object’. Everyone questioned him, ‘If there any evidence to believe your theory’. He said, ‘I can make certain predictions based on my theory. I say Imac evolved from iphone. If my theory is correct, we should find a transitional object with features of both imac and iphone.’ The aliens then started to search the whole home. They went into the basement and found an ipad. Hurrah! Everyone shouted, ‘Man, your theory of evolution is correct. We found the transitional form between iphone and imac’.
iphone, ipad, and imac. Did imac evolve from iphone with ipad as the transitional fossil? The better explanation is all three objects were created by one designer, Apple Company. Evolutionists commit this ipad fallacy in their thinking. When they see something with features of land mammals and whales, they say, that’s the evidence that whales came from land mammals. In reality, whales, mammals and everything in between were created by same God.
When you have a hammer in your hand, every thing looks like a nail. If you believe in evolution, every fossil with intermediate features looks like a transitional fossil.
Evolutionists often add their own preconceptions to scientific method. In his book, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin, Professor Robert M.Hazen wrote these words:
“Science is a slave to rigorous logic and inexorable continuity of argument. If life has changed over time, evolving from a single common ancestor to today’s biological diversity, then many specific predictions about intermediate life-forms must follow. For example, transitional forms between land mammals and whales must have existed sometime in the past.”
Look at the first sentence: ‘Science is a slave to rigorous logic and inexorable continuity of argument’. That is undeniable. Then look at the second sentence: ‘If life has changed over time, evolving from a single common ancestor….’ The second sentence has no relationship with scientific method defended in the first sentence. Life evolved from a single common ancestor…that is a belief. It is not science. Evolutionists club scientific method with their own naturalism with such seamless spontaneity that we fail to see their naturalistic materialism because it was sold on the pedestals of scientific method.
Professor Hazen first states his belief that all life evolved from a single common ancestor and then proceeds to make the predictions: we can find transitional fossils between land mammals and whales. Paleontologist Duane Gish used to say, ‘evolution is just as religious as creationism’.
Step-by-Step Adaptation or Step-by-Step Imagination?
Professor Hazen told us because all live evolved from a single common ancestor, we can make specific predictions about intermediate life-forms and transitional fossils. But why is there such a dearth of transitional fossils? Let us listen to Professor Jerry Coyne.
‘In deed, we know of no adaptations whose origin could not have involved natural selection. How can we be sure? For anatomical traits, we can simply trace their evolution (when possible) in the fossil record, and see in what order different changes took place. We can then determine whether the sequences of changes at least conform to a step-by-step adaptive process. And in every case, we can find at least a feasible Darwinian explanation. We’ve seen this for the evolution of land animals from fish, of whales from land animals, and of birds from reptiles. It didn’t have to be that way. The movement of nostrils to the top of the head in ancestral whales, for example, could have preceded the evolution of fins. That could be the providential act of a creator, but couldn’t have evolved by natural selection. But we always see an evolutionary order that makes Darwinian sense’.
‘If an “adaptive” trait evolved by natural selection instead of having been created, we can make some predictions. First, in principle we should be able to imagine a plausible step-by-step-scenario for the evolution of that trait, with each step raising the fitness (that is, the average number of offspring) of its possessor. For some traits this is easy, like the gradual alteration of the skeleton that turned land animals into whales.”
Please note those words, ‘In principle we should be able to imagine a plausible step-by-step-scenario for the evolution of that trait’ – that is what evolutionists do, they put their imagination on steroids. Using your imagination, you can transform almost anything into any other thing.
Bill Nye wrote in his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, “in 1972 to young evolutionary biologists: Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. They did compelling analysis of a tremendous number of fossils and came to realize that, although we have a great many fossils that show us big lines of descent, there is surprising absence of fossils that would tie certain of these lineages to other lineages. It still wasn’t obvious exactly how dinosaurs was quite clear. Similarly, it wasn’t obvious exactly how dinosaurs became what we think of as modern birds, even once the overall course of that evolution was quite clear. Similarly, it wasn’t obvious how fish ended up walking on land, or how land animals went the other way and ended up swimming around as air breathing fluke-thwapping whales and smiling dolphins. Some of life’s biggest transitions seem to have happened so rapidly that they disappeared between the groves (or digital bits) of the fossil record. That’s what Eldredge and Gould set out to explain with a spectacular new extension of Darwin’s ideas’
Bill Nye the science guy says, ‘the fish became the land animals, and land animals became whales. There is surprising absence of fossils. Why? because it happened so fast.
Jerry Coyne said it happens so slow that is why we don’t see it, we can only imagine. Bill Nye says it happened so fast that is why we don’t see it. Either way we are doomed.
Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) was an Austrian philosopher. He is regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers of science. He called Darwinism a pseudoscience because it is non-falsifiable. You can find explanation for the absence of explanation. There is nothing scientific about Darwinism. It is materialism, naturalism and atheism pretending to be science.
We could easily imagine land mammals evolving into whales over millions of years. But the problem is the viability of each transitional form. English evolutionist and atheist, Richard Dawkins wrote this in his book Climbing Mount Improbable
‘For any physical evolution that involves climbing the steps of Mount Improbable, however, every step must be a viable entity. If a worm evolves into a whale, every intermediate organism along the way must be a viable creature. There can be no intermediate step along the way that is a glob of lifeless tissue.’
Now listen to this. Tom Bethell in his review of Stephen Meyer’s book
‘Yet, transitions from one body plan to another must be viable at every stage. Darwin once argued that bears may have been ancestral to whales. Consider the difficulty. A brilliant engineer might conceivably know how to assemble a whale out of molecules, amino acids, DNA, proteins, and all its other parts. No one remotely knows how to do this. But let us posit an engineer of superhuman skill. Then give him the bad news. In making the bear-to-whale transition, the ever-modifying creature has to continue living, breathing, and reproducing even as those changes are taking place. That would be like telling a naval architect that he has to redesign an army tank into a submarine, but at every transition the vehicle has to function as a weapon of war. By the way, it must also be able to give birth to baby submarines’.
Each transitional form between land mammals to whales must be a viable entity. It should live, breath, function and also should reproduce. It is like asking a naval architect to transform an army tank into a submarine and at every transition, it must be able to give reproduce.
Like Jonah in the belly of the whale….
Millions of intermediate forms must exist and reproduce to evolve into current biological organisms. But we don’t find evidence in the fossils. You see, it takes more faith to believe in Darwinian evolution than in God’s special creation.
In the famous Scopes Trial of 1925, Clarence Darrow mockingly asked William Jennings Bryan, ‘Did Jonah live inside a whale for three days?’
That’s a miracle. If God had created the whales and human beings, could it have been difficult for God to accommodate a 6 foot man inside a 100 foot blue whale? If I could built a home, would it be hard for me to house you in one of the rooms of my home? Evolutionists have no problem believing that rocks could become whales over millions of years, but they find it hard to believe that Creator God would be able to keep a human being inside the belly of a whale.
Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God created whales on Day 5 and human beings on Day 6. Man is the crown of creation because only man was created in the image of God. That is why we care more about human life than animal life. Now, there is nothing wrong to care about animal welfare and climate. But they do not take precedence over human welfare. You know many prominent evolutionists also deeply care about climate change. The documentary Blackfish showed the emotional damage orca whales experience at SeaWorld. The company responded with phasing out all its killer-whale shows. But, how many of these evolutionists stand in front of abortion clinics and protest the horror we inflict on unborn babies?
Richard Dawkins said, “If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends” (Gordon Fisher)
Bill Nye wrote these words, ‘Speaking of being in the game of life, who, in your estimation, is the most dangerous animal on Earth? Who is the baddest badass? It’s you, of course. It’s us. We are the dominant entity around these parts. If you are a cow, humans will breed you, milk you, kill you, and eat you. If you’re a mouse, you can run around underfoot, but humans will exterminate you, if you get in our way. Heck, you can be a whale in the middle of the ocean, and humans will build ships big enough to sail on the open sea, hunt you down, and kill you. Humans are serious business because we have big brains….’
Who is the most dangerous animal on earth? Who is the baddest badass? It’s you and me.
Because we got a big brain which is an accident of nature and we are abusing the nature using it. Darwinian evolution breeds contempt for human beings.
Bible talks about a God who created us and loved us. God has a purpose for our lives. We see this in the story of Jonah and the whale. Jonah was running away from God. He did not want to follow God’s word. He wanted to follow his own will. He boarded a ship heading to Tarshish. But God intervened. He was thrown into the sea and swallowed by a whale.
There is a Jonah in every Richard Dawkins. There is a Jonah in every Christopher Hitchens. There is a Jonah in every Sam Harris. There is a Jonah in every one of us. We are running away from God’s plan for our lives.
But God is calling us back to home. Jesus said, ‘For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (Matthew 12:40).
Jesus is talking about his resurrection from death in this verse. Like Jonah spent three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, I will spend three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The earth vomited out Jonah, but I will raise again from the death victoriously.
American author Herman Melville wrote the novel Moby-Dick, or, the Whale in 1851. The underlying themes of this great novel, among others, are the existence of God and the existence of good and evil.
In preserving Jonah in the belly of the whale for three days, we can see the existence and love of God. In preserving Jesus in the heart of the earth for three days, we can see the existence and love of God. In the death and resurrection of Christ, God not only proved His existence, but also His love, wisdom and power.
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, we can see your wisdom, love, and power as we study the creation of whales. We pray that you open the eyes of our generation to see you as their God, Lord and Savior. In your precious name we pray, Amen.
References:
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life
By Richard Dawkins, Yan Wong
The Walking Whales: From Land to Water in Eight Million Years
By J. G. M. “Hans” Thewissen
The Design of Life
By William A Dembski, Jonathan Wells
Berta and Kovacs, Marine Mammals.
Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of creation, BIll Nye
Darwin and Velikovsky : Cataclysmic Metamorphic Evolution a Materialist …
By Charles Ginenthal
Prothero and Foss (editors), The Evolution of Artiodactyls.
The Selfish Gene
By Richard Dawkins
Virus and the Whale: Exploring Evolution in Creatures Small and Large
edited by Judy Diamond, Carl Zimmer
The Very Best of Richard Dawkins: Quotes from a Devout Atheist
By Gordon Fisher
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
By Richard Dawkins
Peculiar Penguins and Funny Looking Frogs
By Allyson Shepard Bailey
Evo-illusion
By Stephen T. Blume
Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin
By Robert M. Hazen
Why Evolution is true, by Jerry Coyne