In “Nice Try! A Review of Alan Rogers’s The Evidence for Evolution” (Evolution News & Views, April 27, 2012), Jonathan M. comments,
Rogers’s book starts to get a little more controversial at Chapter 3, which asks the question “Does Evolution Make Big Changes?” The chapter begins with a discussion of the fossil record, detailing the whale fossil series, as well as the fish-to-amphibian transition.
Although on the face of it, the whale transition seems to be a relatively nice progression of forms, the main problem is that the transition takes place in far too narrow a window of time for it to be reasonably attributed to a Darwinian process.
The sheer force of this conundrum is only properly appreciated when one considers the multiple feats of anatomical novelty, innovative engineering and genetic rewiring necessary to change a terrestrial mammal like Pakicetus into a fully aquatic whale. Indeed, evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg has argued that even many of the relatively minor changes are extremely unlikely to have occurred in the timeframe allowed. Consider the following small sample of necessary modifications: …
More recently, however, a jawbone was discovered that belonged to a fully aquatic whale dating to 49 million years ago, only four million years after Pakicetus! This means that the first fully aquatic whales date to around the time when walking whales (Ambulocetus) first appear. This substantially reduces the time window — to 4 or 5 million years, perhaps even less — that may be allotted to the Darwinian mechanism to accomplish truly radical engineering innovations and genetic rewiring. It also suggests that this fully aquatic whale existed before its previously assumed semi-aquatic archaeocetid ancestors.
It’s the usual problem of Darwinists trying to prove too much, jam too much into their theory …