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On Whale Origins, Evolutionary Biologist Goes After Dentist While Hiding Behind Family Doctor

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At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne commends a video on whale evolution by Jon Peters, a family physician in Portland, Oregon, as a challenge to Don McLeroy, a dentist in Bryan, Texas:

To the battle of the local healthcare providers, Dr. Coyne, evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, adds this:

[Dr. Peters’s video is] especially useful as ammunition against those who claim that microevolution occurs but not “macroevolution” — usually defined as the evolution of one “kind” of animal into another “kind.” “Kind”, of course, is a Biblical term without any biological meaning. But if it has any meaning at all, surely the evolution of a small terrestrial artiodactyl into a giant seagoing mammal without hindlimbs is macroevolution. And it all happened in a relatively short time: about 10 million years. In contrast, the evolution of Homo sapiens from our common ancestor with chimps took roughly 7 million years, a much slower rate of morphological change.

Actually, the Bible has nothing to do with it.

The best responses on whale evolution deal not with Scripture or so much with the fossils themselves but with the fact that the fossil record shows that whales emerged in a very short evolutionary period of time, as Coyne says: less than 10 million years. The point is, natural selection and random mutation cannot explain the rapid “evolution” of whales in the fossil record. Even if we take all of their fossils in the supposed whale series at face value, too many changes are required too quickly to account for the origin of whales by random mutation and natural selection.

Whale origins are an instance where evolutionists think they have a couple of potentially transitional fossils, but time constraints on the fossil record, and the mathematics of population genetics, make it absolutely impossible that whales evolved from land mammals by unguided Darwinian processes.

Rather than focusing his challenge on Dr. McLeroy, why not grapple with a fellow evolutionary biologist, like Richard Sternberg? See here for excellent lectures by our colleague Dr. Sternberg on:

Here are podcasts from ID the Future, with Casey Luskin interviewing Sternberg:

We’ve contributed some critiques touching on the whale evolution scenario ourselves here at Evolution News:

Oh look, here’s Coyne going after McLeroy again this morning (“Don McLeroy responds to the evidence for whale evolution“), chiding him for affirming the “old canard about ‘evolution can’t create that much change in the DNA!'” and correcting his spelling.

This is not to suggest any disrespect to Dr. McLeroy, a former chairman of the Texas State Board of Education and veteran of battles over evolution, or to Dr. Peters, who seems to have a thriving practice of his own, and best wishes to him. But honestly, if you’re going to argue with us about a subject like this, take it to the expert, why don’t you?

Photo credit: Long-finned pilot whale skeleton, by Wolfgang Sauber (Own work) [GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Evolution News & Science Today (EN) provides original reporting and analysis about evolution, neuroscience, bioethics, intelligent design and other science-related issues, including breaking news about scientific research. It also covers the impact of science on culture and conflicts over free speech and academic freedom in science. Finally, it fact-checks and critiques media coverage of scientific issues.

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