From the Mailbag

I got a message in email asking for my opinion on a couple of quotations. (Reposted here by permission.)

From: “D.R. Smith”
Subject: Alleged problems with evolution…
Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2006 08:02:33 -0500

Mr. Elsberry:

Your name/email information appeared at the “Evolutionary Zoologists” website, which came up when I was trying to dig up some information on the two gentlemen mentioned below.

In the ongoing (and never ending, it seems) debate between the so-called “evolutionists” and “creationists”, I made the comment to an evolution skeptic that only ONE relatively radical change between organisms was necessary to suggest that speciation (relatively radical change) was a plausible possibility for every other organism as well. He agreed, and asked what is the best documented (through the fossil record) example of that. I responded that whales evolving from land mammals appears to be the best documented example of evolutionary morphology.

He responded with these two quotes that dispute the contention that the fossil record is being interpreted accurately:

The lack of transitional forms in the fossil record [is] realized by evolutionary whale experts like the late E.J. Slijper: “We do not possess a single fossil of the transitional forms between the aforementioned land animals [i.e., carnivores and ungulates] and the whales.” (E.J. Slijper, Dolphins and Whales (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 17.)

Both modern branches of whales, the toothed whales (Odontoceti) and baleen whales (Mysticeti), appear abruptly in the fossil record. Stahl points out the following regarding the skull structure in both types: “shows a strange modification not present, even in a rudimentary way, in Basilosaurus and its relatives: in conjunction with the backward migration of the nostrils on the dorsal surface of the head, the nasal bones have been reduced and carried upwards and the premaxillary and maxillary elements have expanded to the rear to cover the original braincase roof.” (B.J. Stahl, Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 489)

Slijper appears to have the credentials that grant him at least some degree of authority/credibility so that categorically dismissing his comments without considerable research may be premature (although he’s quoted @ answersingenesis, a clearly anti-evolution site). And Stahl’s comment appears to be specific enough so that the link between land mammals and whales (as established through the similarity in jawbones) is not as much of a slam-dunk (agreed upon by the vast majority of researchers) as it is often presented.

My own acceptance of evolution as the elegant explanation that it is is based on its consistency with a wide variety of sciences, all of which cross-verify the amount of time needed for evolution and even abiogenesis, as well as providing a mechanism for change simple enough to not require intelligent design. I take the land-animal-to-whale transition as a matter of faith/probability — and talkorigins.org represents that transition as perhaps the best documented transitional fossil record that we have.

But I don’t have an effective way to rebut the above comments. They’re probably out of context — typical creationist misquote — but I can’t prove that yet.

Are you familiar with these gentlemen — and do you know a specific-enough argument that neutralizes these contentions?

Thanks for your time.

Respectfully,

Doug Smith

Slijper and Stahl are authoritative enough, but one has to keep in mind that the state of the evidence changes over time. In 1962 and 1974, those statements were reasonable. Today, however, they are not. Fossil whales at various stages have now been found. Gingerich and Thewissen began looking in the right places (Egypt and Pakistan, as it turned out), and have each contributed to a nice set of fossils documenting the divergence of whales from terrestrial precursors. This research program is pretty much a post 1990 thing.

So today someone who dismissed a fossil record for whales would simply be revealing their ignorance.

One of the cool bits of research on fossil whales is that the fossils were subjected to analysis for varying isotope distributions, and the transition from fresh-water to marine environments is not only documented, but has an estimate of having occurred over a period of about 4 million years.

See also:
http://www.talkorigins.org/features/whales/
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC216_1.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section2.html

Wesley