LONG STORY SHORT (EPISODE 2): Did Bears Really Evolve Into Whales?
Charles Darwin caught a lot of flak for his statement in an early edition of “The Origin of the Species” concerning the likelihood of whales in the ocean representing an evolutionary process that began with bears on the land becoming more aquatic.
“I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale,” Darwin wrote.
But he got so much derision from other scientists that he dropped that statement from subsequent editions. Guess what, scientists aren’t laughing at Darwin’s bears-to-whales suggestion today, they are actually proposing the same thing! Check it out here with Episode Two of the Discovery Institute’s “Long Story Short” animated video series:
STILL NOT SURE ABOUT THIS INTELLIGENT DESIGN STUFF?
Check out “CONSIDER THIS,” a new regular feature on HillFaith that links you to the latest scientific advocacy making case for Intelligent Design and critiquing ID’s many critics.
The evolution of whales from carnivores was a common idea in my childhood, in the 1950s, and for some decades after that. But it appears that now that a lot of species have had their DNA sequences, zoologists are converging on the idea that whales are most closely related to hippopotami. See for example the Wikipedia article on Cetacea for a quick summary.
The fact that you have fossils for a species with a certain age, doesn’t mean that the species only existed at that time. The species likely existed for millions of years, we just don’t have fossils preserved from all the time it existed. It is possible that the sequence of different species had overlapping ages and coexisted for millions of years, so an intermediate fossil could be younger than a fossil for a later evolved species. I don’t know if this is the case with bears and whales, I’m just pointing out that lining up fossils by age doesn’t prove or disprove that evolution occurred. For example, modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted for a long period of time, so there are some Neanderthal fossils that are younger than some modern human fossils.