On Wed, 5 Jul 1995 22:57:28 -0400 you wrote:
GM>Abstract: 1. This is my response to Ashby Camp's critique of my
>whale transitional form post..
SJ> 2. Progressive Creation concedes that there may be fossil forms
intermediate between land mammals and whales, but questions the
assumption that they are necessarily evidence for naturalistic
evolution. This is part two of a four part response, contending that
there are major problems with the naturalistic evolutionary hypothesis
for mesonychid - whale transition, namely: 2. the comparatively brief
time-frame of 10-15 million years to effect this massive transition.
The real issue, is not transitional forms, but genetic mutation rates.
Behind change in body form, is genetic change by random point
mutations. In a fully naturalistic process, the change from a
mesonychid to a whale can only occur by "slow, gradual, cumulative
natural selection", as confirmed by Dawkins:
"Cumulative selection, by slow and gradual degrees, is the
explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been
proposed, for the existence of life's complex design... To 'tame'
chance means to break down the very improbable into less improbable
small components arranged in series. No matter how improbable it is
that an X could have arisen from a Y in a single step, it is always
possible to conceive of a series of infinitesimally graded
intermediates between them. However improbable a large-scale change
may be, smaller changes are less improbable. And provided we
postulate a sufficiently large series of sufficiently finely graded
intermediates, we shall be able to derive anything from anything else,
without invoking astronomical improbabilities... It is the contention
of the Darwinian world-view that both these provisos are met, and that
slow, gradual, cumulative natural selection is the ultimate
explanation for our existence. If there are versions of the evolution
theory that deny slow gradualism, and deny the central role of natural
selection, they may be true in particular cases. But they cannot be
the whole truth, for they deny the very heart of the evolution theory,
which gives it the power to dissolve astronomical improbabilities and
explain prodigies of apparent miracle." (Dawkins R., "The Blind
Watchmaker", 1991, Penguin, pp317-318)
There are three issues here that will recur in my critique of
naturalistic evolution as the likely cause of any land-mammal to
whale transition: 1. Time-frame; 2. Mechanism; 3. Evidence.
1. Time Frame:
According to a recent Discover article, the time-frame between stages
in the crucial Mesonychid to Prozeuglodon transition is:
"Mesonychid (55 million years ago)
Ambulocetus (50 million years ago)
Rodhocetus (46 million years ago)
Prozeuglodon (40 million years ago)"
(Zimmer C., "Back to the Sea", Discover, January 1995, p83)
That is 5 million years to go from "an extinct hyenalike land mammal,
called a mesonychid" to "Ambulocetus...a seven- foot-long creature"
with "feet with toes (and presumably webbing) that could carry its
weight on land", but which "didn't..have the tail flukes that living
whales use to swim" but "instead it flexed its spine up and down and
kicked its legs, otter-style", and which "was pulling itself up on the
shore every night" (Discover, p84).
Macro-evolution has always needed as much time as it can get
for it's undirected naturalistic mechanisms to work. For example,
George Wald, late Professor of Biology at Harvard, speaking of a
naturalistic mechanims for the origin of life, claimed that time
was all-important to converting high improbababily into near
certainty:
"The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the
category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side . However
improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it
involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least
once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and
reproduction, once may be enough. Time is in fact the hero of the
plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two
billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human
experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the "impossible"
bemes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually
certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles."
(Wald G., "The origin of life'. Scientific American, vol. 191 (2),
August 1954, p.48).
Dawkins also has claimed that sufficient time is critical to the blind
watchmaker thesis: "We are allowed to do this only if there has been
sufficient time to fit all the intermediates in." (Dawkins, p317)
It may be claimed that 5 million years is a lot of time, but in
palaeontological terms it isn't. For example, Gould has referred to
"100,000 years" as being "geologically instantaneous" (Gould S.J.,
"Punctuated equilibrium-a different way of seeing", New Scientist, 15
April 1982, p137). Even if there were some hyperbole in Gould's
statement, it is clear that in geological time-scales, 5 million years
is a very short length of time indeed.
It important to actually look at the sketches in Discover, to
appreciate the magnitude of these changes. The two animals looked
nothing like each other, and it is unimaginable to me that such a
rapid change could occur in only 5 million years by a process of
"slow, gradual, cumulative natural selection". It must be remembered
that, according to evolutionists, this is the same time frame it has
taken for a chimp ancestor to change 2% of its DNA to become homo
sapiens.
However, that is nothing compared to the 4 million year transition
from Ambulocetus to Rodhocetus. Rodhocetus looks like a real
whale with tail flukes and what looks like blubber. "Rodhocetus's
legs were a third smaller than those of Ambulocetus, restricting it to
a crocodile waddle on land. Its legs were shrinking because
Rodhocetus no longer depended on them for swimming-massive tail
vertebrae indicate that it had a powerful tail that allowed it to go
where no whale had gone before...Rodhocetus was probably out there for
weeks at a time, more committed to the water" (Discover, p84).
The final step from Rodhocetus to Prozeuglodon took 6 million years.
Prozeuglodon was "a fossil whale" which "was perfectly adapted for
life at sea" but which "still carried, near the end of its 15-foot
body, a pair of vestigial 6-inch legs." This last change is perhaps
not that difficult to imagine, since outwardly the two forms look
similar. In fact this 6 million year transition only throws up in
sharp relief the previous massive changes from Mesonychid -
Ambulocetus (5 MY) and from Ambulocetus - Rodhocetus (4 MY).
Lester & Bohlin compare Stanley point that "the basic whale design had
to evolve in less than 12 million years." (Stanley S.M, "The New
Evolutionary Timetable", 1981, Basic Books, NY, p119), and compare
this with the Hawaiian honeycreepers: "in the estimated
5-million-year existence of the oldest Hawaiian island, nowhere near
this kind of divergence has taken place in the Hawaiian honeycreepers.
They are all still easily relatable within the same low-level taxon."
(Lester L.P. & Bohlin R.G., "The Natural Limits to Biological Change,
Second Edition, 1989, Word Publishing, Dallas TX, pp143-144)
Johnson cites Stanley's use of the example of the bat and the whale,
which are supposed to have evolved from a common mammalian ancestor in
little more than ten million years, to illustrate the insuperable
problem that fossil stasis poses for Darwinian gradualism:
"Let us suppose that we wish, hypothetically, to form a bat or a whale
. . . [by a] process of gradual transformation of established species.
If an average chronospecies lasts nearly a million years, or even
longer, and we have at our disposal only ten million years, then we
have only ten or fifteen chronospeciesl to align, end-to-end, to form
a continuous lineage connecting our primitive little mammal with a bat
or a whale. This is clearly preposterous. Chronospecies, by
definition, grade into each other, and each one encompasses very
little change. A chain of ten or fifteen of these might move us from
one small rodent like form to a slightly different one, perhaps
representing a new genus, but not to a bat or a whale!" (Stanley S.M,
"The New Evolutionary Timetable" (1981) in Johnson P.E., "Darwin on
Trial", Second Edition, 1993, Inter Varsity Press, Illinois, p51)
According to Davis and Kenyon, the transition from Mesonychid to
Basilosaurus (a later whale), is too rapid for evolution theory:
"Stephen Gould has calculated the time allowed by the fossil
occurrences as far too brief; the changes required to evolve a
Basilosaurus from the Mesonyx by punctuated speciation
events are more than two orders of magnitude too great, even from the
Darwinian perspective. If we are to accept the existence of
transitional species leading to the whale, say design proponents, we
must do so without clear evidence." (Davis P. & Kenyon D.H., "Of
Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins",
Second Edition, 1993, Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Richardson,
TX, p103).
Continued #3. Mechanism
God bless.
Stephen
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