Biology prof: Whale, dolphin hip bones known for a long time to NOT be vestigial

_{Denyse O'Leary

September 10, 2014

Darwinism, Evolution}

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(But they made such a good example that … )

Further to “Vestigial” whale, dolphin hip bones actually needed for, um, reproduction (Lots of vestigial organs prove that Darwinian evolution is true, but not finding any also proves it true. Sign of a strong theory.):

David A. DeWitt kindly writes to say,

This is not really new. I have material from several years ago that showed that the pelvic bones were attachment sites for muscles involved in copulation. Pythons also use their ‘pelvic girdle’ during mating. The males use them to rub a particular patch of scales on the female which help them to become receptive to the male.

The only new aspect to this is the analysis of 3D shapes and the correlations to testes size which makes an evolutionary story. These bones never were vestigial and it has been known for a long time.

He adds,

I am convinced that Darwinists ignored the known function of the whale pelvic bones until they had a Darwinian ‘just so’ story to link it too. Let’s see how long it takes for this to show up in biology textbooks since they now discuss them as ‘vestigial’ and evidence for evolution.

Note: Some have written to say that an appendage can be vestigial but still functional. Actually, if it assists reproduction, it may be critical, but we won’t quibble.

The problem is that the qualification (vestigial but functional) takes all the punch out of the claim that vestigial organs demonstrate explicitly unguided (Darwinian) evolution. If evolution were guided or designed, we might expect that some parts greatly change their function as a response to changed circumstances, as here.

Evidence for Darwinian evolution would be vestigial parts that are actually useless but not naturally selected out because they do not compromise survival. Perhaps discussion should focus on those parts, if anyone can identify them.

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Pythons mating:

Comments

bw 4, I can't argue with your impeccable math. Your use of the famed evolutionary Just So series of imaginary numbers is a real treat! :) Though it does seem to me that the whale might want to excrete waste, digest krill, drink seawater and reproduce once in a while...anthropic_{September 10, 2014
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The overall pattern in the fossil record looks nothing like Darwinists originally imagined it to be. Here are a few (more) notes along that line:
Fish & Dinosaur Evolution vs. The Actual Evidence - video and notes http://vimeo.com/30932397 The Unknown Origin of Pterosaurs - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP6htc371fM Bird Evolution vs. The Actual Evidence - video and notes http://vimeo.com/30926629 "Darwin’s prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record." Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myth of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 45-46. “A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens…Even allowing for the poor record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented…there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or the intellectual sense.” Dr. Ian Tattersall: – paleoanthropologist – emeritus curator of the American Museum of Natural History – (Masters of the Planet, 2012) “It is hard for us paleontologists, steeped as we are in a tradition of Darwinian analysis, to admit that neo-Darwinian explanations for the Cambrian explosion have failed miserably. New data acquired in recent years, instead of solving Darwin’s dilemma, have rather made it worse. Meyer describes the dimensions of the problem with clarity and precision. His book is a game changer for the study of evolution and points us in the right direction as we seek a new theory for the origin of animals.” -Dr. Mark McMenamin - 2013 Paleontologist at Mt. Holyoke College and author of The Emergence of Animals “The Cambrian Explosion occurred in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at that time. …not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion…. Contrary to Darwin’s expectation that new data would reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness and geological abruptness of this formative event…” (Gould, Nature, Vol.377, 26 10/95, p.682). “If we were to expect to find ancestors to or intermediates between higher taxa, it would be the rocks of the late Precambrian to Ordivician times, when the bulk of the world’s higher animal taxa evolved. Yet traditional alliances are unknown or unconfirmed for any of the phyla or classes appearing then.” (Valentine, Development As An Evolutionary Process, p.84, 1987) "The record of the first appearance of living phyla, classes, and orders can best be described in Wright's (1) term as 'from the top down'." (James W. Valentine, "Late Precambrian bilaterians: Grades and clades," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 91: 6751-6757 (July 1994).) “Darwin had a lot of trouble with the fossil record because if you look at the record of phyla in the rocks as fossils why when they first appear we already see them all. The phyla are fully formed. It’s as if the phyla were created first and they were modified into classes and we see that the number of classes peak later than the number of phyla and the number of orders peak later than that. So it’s kind of a top down succession, you start with this basic body plans, the phyla, and you diversify them into classes, the major sub-divisions of the phyla, and these into orders and so on. So the fossil record is kind of backwards from what you would expect from in that sense from what you would expect from Darwin’s ideas." James W. Valentine - On the Origin of Phyla: Interviews with James W. Valentine - Challenging Fossil of a Little Fish "In Chen’s view, his evidence supports a history of life that runs opposite to the standard evolutionary tree diagrams, a progression he calls top-down evolution." Jun-Yuan Chen is professor at the Nanjing Institute of Paleontology and Geology http://www.fredheeren.com/boston.htm As Roger Lewin (1988) explains in Science, "Several possible patterns exist for the establishment of higher taxa, the two most obvious of which are the bottom-up and the top-down approaches. In the first, evolutionary novelties emerge, bit by bit. The Cambrian explosion appears to conform to the second pattern, the top-down effect." Erwin et al. (1987), in their study of marine invertebrates, similarly conclude that, "The fossil record suggests that the major pulse of diversification of phyla occurs before that of classes, classes before that of orders, orders before that of families. The higher taxa do not seem to have diverged through an accumulation of lower taxa." Indeed, the existence of numerous small and soft-bodied animals in the Precambrian strata undermines one of the most popular responses that these missing transitions can be accounted for by them being too small and too-soft bodied to be preserved. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/12/jerry_coynes_c067021.html Scientific study turns understanding about evolution on its head - July 30, 2013 Excerpt: evolutionary biologists,,, looked at nearly one hundred fossil groups to test the notion that it takes groups of animals many millions of years to reach their maximum diversity of form. Contrary to popular belief, not all animal groups continued to evolve fundamentally new morphologies through time. The majority actually achieved their greatest diversity of form (disparity) relatively early in their histories. ,,,Dr Matthew Wills said: "This pattern, known as 'early high disparity', turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years. This isn't a phenomenon particularly associated with the first radiation of animals (in the Cambrian Explosion), or periods in the immediate wake of mass extinctions.",,, Author Martin Hughes, continued: "Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on. Co-author Dr Sylvain Gerber, added: "A key question now is what prevents groups from generating fundamentally new forms later on in their evolution.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-07-scientific-evolution.html “With the benefit of hindsight, it is amazing that paleontologists could have accepted gradual evolution as a universal pattern on the basis of a handful of supposedly well-documented lineages (e.g. Gryphaea, Micraster, Zaphrentis) none of which actually withstands close scrutiny." Christopher R.C. Paul, “Patterns of Evolution and Extinction in Invertebrates,” K.C. Allen and D.E.G. Briggs, eds., Evolution and the Fossil Record (Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 105. "It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student from Trueman's Ostrea/Gryphaea to Carruthers' Zaphrentis delanouei, have now been 'debunked'. Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.' Dr. Derek V. Ager (Department of Geology & Oceonography, University College, Swansea, UK), 'The nature of the fossil record'. Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, vol.87(2), 1976,p.132. "The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find' over and over again' not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another." Paleontologist, Derek V. Ager, “The Nature of the Fossil Record,” 87 Proceedings of the British Geological Association 87 (1976): 133. (Department of Geology & Oceanography, University College, Swansea, UK) “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution…This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large.” G.G.Simpson - one of the most influential American Paleontologist of the 20th century "A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants - instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God." Paleontologist, Mark Czarnecki "There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways, it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration. The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps." T. Neville George - Professor of paleontology - Glasgow University, "Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them." David Kitts - Paleontologist - D.B. Kitts, Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory (1974), p. 467. "The long-term stasis, following a geologically abrupt origin, of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists" – Stephen Jay Gould - Harvard “The record certainly did not reveal gradual transformations of structure in the course of time. On the contrary, it showed that species generally remained constant throughout their history and were replaced quite suddenly by significantly different forms. New types or classes seemed to appear fully formed, with no sign of an evolutionary trend by which they could have emerged from an earlier type.” Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 187. "No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution." - Niles Eldredge , "Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate," 1996, p.95 "Enthusiastic paleontologists in several countries have claimed pieces of this missing record, but the claims have all been disputed and in any case do not provide real connections. That brings me to the second most surprising feature of the fossil record...the abruptness of some of the major changes in the history of life." Ager, D. - Author of "The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record"-1981 "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology." Stephen Jay Gould
etc.. etc.. etc.. All in all, The fossil record is a major embarrassment for Darwinists!bornagain77_{September 10, 2014
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RodW - please could you provide a source to show evidence of femur/partial hindleg in whales/dolphins other than just aberrant small bone spurs/growth? And also please provide details of the genetic information responsible for these structures so we can determine that they don't perform other vital functions.Dr JDD_{September 10, 2014
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@anthropic, we can use some simple maths to work this out. 1 x mutation for the skin/fur -> blubber conversion 1 x mutation for the nose -> blowhole conversion 1 x mutation for the forelimb -> flipper conversion 1 x mutation for the hindlimb -> fluke conversion 1 x mutation for the teeth -> filtering plates No further significant mutations needed unless I missed something. If we take the number derived by Dr. Sternberg as our guide, the we are looking at a process of around 215 million years. Now if I remember rightly early whale ancestors were thought to be only around 50 million years old but there is nothing to say the mutations above couldn't have happened in parallel or slightly overlapping and as such I think there is no great controversy when it comes to the evolution of whales from earlier mammals.bw_{September 10, 2014
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as to this claim from RW "There is a beautiful series of transitional fossils that show the transformation of a land-dwelling artiodactyl to a fully aquatic whale. Throughout this transition we see that gradual reduction and loss of the hindlimbs and pelvis." and yet the series is 'misleading' as even Phil Gingerich himself admits in this following video,,, Whale Evolution vs. The Actual Evidence – video – fraudulent fossils revealed http://vimeo.com/30921402 Making up missing links with plaster and body parts from other creatures – April 2014 Excerpt: The two scientists who found the lion’s share of walking whale fossils essentially created the best fossil proof of evolution using plaster models and drawings and supplied these to museums and science magazines. In each case, they started with incomplete fossils of a land mammal. Whenever a fossil part was missing, they substituted a whale body part (blowholes, fins and flukes) on the skeletal model or skull that they distributed to museums. When these same scientists later found fossils negating their original interpretations, they did not recall the plaster models or drawings. Now museums are full of skulls and skeletons of ‘walking whales’ that are simply false.” Dr. Werner went on to say, “I suspect some curators are not aware of the significance of these substitutions nor are they aware of the updated fossils. Museums should now remove all of the altered skeletons, skulls and drawings since the most important parts of these ‘walking whales’ are admittedly made up. Museums will also have to delete these images from their websites as they are misleading the public.” – http://www.thegrandexperiment.com/whale-evolution.html further notes debunking the claim are here: https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/vestigial-whale-dolphin-hip-bones-actually-needed-for-um-reproduction/#comment-514004bornagain77_{September 10, 2014
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RW 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85kThFEDi8o Dr. Richard Sternberg uses well known population genetics to estimate that it took 43 million years for two coordinated mutations to show up and become fixed in the putative ancestors of whales. How many coordinated mutations would you estimate are necessary to turn a land animal into an ocean going cetacean, RW?anthropic_{September 10, 2014
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The problem is that the qualification (vestigial but functional) takes all the punch out of the claim that vestigial organs demonstrate explicitly unguided (Darwinian) evolution
Not at all. There is a beautiful series of transitional fossils that show the transformation of a land-dwelling artiodactyl to a fully aquatic whale. Throughout this transition we see that gradual reduction and loss of the hindlimbs and pelvis. The tiny speck of a bone thats all thats left of the pelvis is not performing its original function- therefore its vestigial. Its performing a new function -anchoring the 'mobile penis'. This example provides a great contrast between what we'd expect to see from evolution vs ID. Evolution is severely constrained in a way that ID isn't. Natural selection has to build on whats already present in incremental steps. Thats why a fully aquatic animal has functional parts that look like they were derived from a land-dwelling animal. What possible reason could an intelligent designer have to do it that way - to deceive us?? (And for that matter if whales and dolphina were created as they are now why do dophins have the genetic program to make a femur bone and partial hind leg, which they sometimes express? ) If you say the designer had to include that bone thats outright false. The designer had many other options other than using a bone that for all the world looked remarkable like a reduced pelvis. He could have used connective tissue! After all there are 2 species of whale that have completely lost the pevlis. They use connective tissue as an anchor and manage to 'get busy' just fine. As an aside. Have any of the posters here considered cutting and pasting the articles from ENV here for comment? I know some of you provide links but the article would be better for going back and forth to comments.RodW_{September 10, 2014
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