Lynn, without the ball vertebrae and flippers, the Rodhocetus no longer fits the hypothesis. Now it would be hard to imagine it being anything other than just another extinct land animal. The Rodhocetus was Dr. Gingerich’s animal – his find – his “baby”; so you heard it straight from the horse’s mouth.
There has to be some sort of “transitional” feature before it can (truthfully) be considered a transitional fossil. Traditionally there has been a lot of fraud in this discipline; but I suspect Gringrich truly believed he had a transition. so he “speculated it had a fluke”, and those features (the fluke and flippers) were added by artists. Later, when he found the forearm and hand fossils, he realized that it “doesn’t have the kind of arms that can be spread out like flippers”. No flippers – no fluke tail – no whale.
You do realize that they don’t just decide that it’s a proto-whale from fluke and flippers alone, right?
They really don’t just make this stuff up.
All it takes is a little Wikipedia search to find that there are all kinds of intermediary aspects of even just the head bones that they found…
Derived traits in R. kasrani, relative to older archaeocetes such as Pakicetus, includes high-crowned cheek teeth, larger auditory bullae, larger mandibular foramen, and mandibular canals. The higher neural spines and shorter femur (60–70%) distinguishes Rodhocetus from the more primitive Ambulocetus. The convex posterior surface of the exoccipital, shorter cervical vertebrae, and unfused sacral vertebrae distinguishes R. kasrani from Indocetus. In contrast to later archaeocetes such as Protocetus and later cetaceans, Rodhocetus retains external nares above upper canines, high neural spines on anterior thoracic vertebrae, and four sacral vertebrae with sacroiliac joints similar to those in land-mammals (suggesting a hip joint that could support the body weight.)[6]
Several cranial features identifies R. kasrani as an archaeocete: both the premaxillae and the dentaries are elongated, the frontal shield is wide, and the nuchal crest is high. The auditory bullae are large and dense but, there are no associated pterygoid fossae or air sinuses. The mandibular foramina are large with a pan bone 90 mm (3.5 in) long and 65 mm (2.6 in) high.
You would get a date with a plus-or-minus error figure. You would not be completely confident of this date until you crosschecked it with other knowledge of the rock. If it was completely lost from its original strata, perhaps other methods of radiometric dating would be appropriate, or perhaps it would contain distinctive minerals or fossils which would let you associate it with known strata. If you got two results which disagreed according to the margins of error, it would be on you to figure out why and/or find a third method of dating which could resolve the discrepancy.
A rock which you believed old but was in fact only 6000 years would certainly not fall solidly in the middle of your dating method’s range; it would have some widely varying results all on the younger end of it, unless other factors (which scientists do spend a lot of time and energy quantifying, so there’s no use appealing to vague handwavey “other factors”) were affecting your measurements.
What? Its entire shape is semiaquatic at least.
Through a principal components analysis Gingerich 2003 demonstrated that Rodhocetus had trunk and limb proportions similar to the Russian desman, a foot-powered swimmer using its tail mainly as a rudder.
The metatarsals and phalanges are very long and thin and can not have been weight-bearing, suggesting that Rodhocetus was predominantly aquatic and on land must have walked on the plantar surface of the tarsals. The shape of the metatarsal and phalanges reveal that these bones could be tightly compressed during flexion and widely separated during extension.
The ear bones, the fusion of spinal vertebrae, the elongation of the skull and transition of the nares, the gradual shrinking of the limbs…transitional fossils don’t just look at a single feature, friend. I wonder if you’ve looked at the full range of transitional fossils we’re talking about?
You’ve summed it up perfectly here. I was going to provide a response to @LXX_Researcher’s last reply to me, but there isn’t much point in doing so. The fact remains that the RATE team themselves have admitted that billions of years’ worth of nuclear decay have taken place since Creation, that trying to squeeze it all into just six thousand years would have released enough heat to raise the earth’s temperature to 22,000°C, and that no known thermodynamic process could have removed the heat fast enough. Yet despite their own admission of an extraordinary scientific impasse, the RATE project is still being marketed as a success, with books, DVDs and websites hailing the project as a success and proclaiming that science supports a young earth. I’m sorry, but that is lying, pure and simple.
The fact of the matter is that accelerated nuclear decay is science fiction. It simply doesn’t work. Even allowing for the possibility of miracles, it is simply not possible to squeeze 4.5 billion years’ worth of evidence into just six thousand without either descending into absurdity or flat-out lying about it.
And what of the Bible? Well the Bible is very clear about how we are to approach science. Deuteronomy 25:13-16 says this:
13Do not have two differing weights in your bag – one heavy, one light. 14Do not have two differing measures in your house – one large, one small. 15You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.16For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.
I do not know of a single claim of evidence for a young earth that obeys these verses of Scripture.
Okay, but what made that progression happen? Was it skepticism towards generally accepted science? Compulsion to interpret scripture “more literally”? What specifically?
All lifeforms had a common designer, and God said everything that he created was to multiply after its own kind:
“And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.” – Gen 1:21-22 KJV
And indeed they did!
I believe that Wikipedia article is somewhat behind the times. Both the Rodhocetus and Ambulocetus have been discredited as whale transitions. Some museums do not mention the Rodhocetus:
I personally do not believe there is such a thing as a transitional fossil. I had imagined over the years the difficulties of changing one species to another, so I was not shocked when Dr. David Berlinski said he had counted about 50,000 transformations that would be required to transform a cow into a whale (before he quit counting).
Now, remember, this mathematician is surrounded by a large team of top-notch scientists at the Discovery Institute; so it would have been a snap for him to approach Dr. David Mention (M.D., Ph.D. Biochemistry) and ask, “Hey, David, how many transformations would be required to change a cow’s eye into a whale’s eye?” And so forth. The video segment lasts about 4 minutes:
Berlinski made it clear that using the cow was strictly an example, and he later mentioned the Ambulocetus, revealing he was not ignorant of the imaginations of the “transitionalists”.
But the “transitionalists” went absolutely nuts–hysteria on afterburner! Check out this article and read how some of his critics change history:
That drawing is based on someone’s vivid imagination, Lynn, generally with little more to go on than a fragmented skeleton. It would be a miracle if a living specimen actually looked like that.
That is old and discredited, Lynn.
Dr. Phil Gingerich is one of the top scientists, if not the top scientist, studying whale evolution. If he says it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.
There are lots of transitional proto-whale forms. The AMNH and Smithsonian presentations you linked to are highly selective, picking just the highlights, not trying to be an exhaustive presentation of all early whales. So if Rodhocetus isn’t the cream of the crop of examples, they won’t include it. It has nothing to do with it being “discredited.”
It’s like if you had to give an overview of Romance languages, you probably wouldn’t include Catalan or Romansh. But that doesn’t mean these aren’t languages. They’re just not your top picks for surveying Romance languages.
Well, I think they actually have important questions to answer:
Think about that. I want more details of his method. So David Berlinski is sitting. He’s contemplating the cow, and he’s enumerating the changes. Does he just make a hash mark on a sheet of paper when he thinks of one? Does he make a list? He says he came up with 50,000 items, and that it was easy. Let’s see a recitation. […] How does he know that any of his litany of changes are actually biologically relevant? And do we really believe that David Berlinski can identify that many significant biological differences between two species of mammals?
It’s a fair point. The man’s a mathematician, after all, neither a biologist nor a geneticist. Why do you believe him?
You mean besides the fact that he was a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at Columbia University, he is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, he is a literary genius who has authored some fascinating books, and he seems to know what he is talking about? I cannot think of a thing.
Okay, well, I wasn’t able to ascertain this from his Wikipedia page, though it mentions a stint in biology research. Thanks for filling in the blanks for me. It does seem that most of his education and publications are in mathematics and philosophy, for what it’s worth.
Anyway, what this does is makes it so that I think maybe it’s worth listening to his arguments. But he doesn’t give an argument. He gives a just-so story: 50,000 changes. Okay, so list them! For a movement that complains of tired evolutionary “just-so stories,” this is a just-so story as well and needs to be carefully laid out, not just baldly stated.
I see that Ryan studied under Gingerich at Michigan:
"In this class, we read an article from Scientific American called “The Mammals That Conquered the Seas.” It highlighted a University of Michigan paleontologist named Philip Gingerich and his work on the evolution of whales from four-legged terrestrial mammals. Growing up, I had never been particularly interested in fossils, but the idea of “walking whales” was something that grabbed my attention. Near the end of this course, we took a field trip to the natural history museum at the University of Michigan and got to go behind-the-scenes to explore the research collections and the fossil preparation lab. I got to see and hold some of these whale fossils that I had read about, and it was at this point that I began to realize that God was calling me to study evolution.
“So during my final years at Calvin, I took as many science courses as I could, and in my senior year, I applied to several doctoral programs. I ended up being accepted to study fossil whales in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan under the tutelage of Philip Gingerich himself.”
You explain that your encounters with nasty people encouraged you to go back and reevaluate. I’m baffled by a couple of things–how you determine what is “nasty.” You called me “nasty” after just a few posts. I’m also baffled that any serious study of both sides of the argument could lead anyone from an OEC position to a YEC position. But to each his own, I suppose.
quote=“AMWolfe, post:134, topic:5302”]
Anyway, what this does is makes it so that I think maybe it’s worth listening to his arguments. But he doesn’t give an argument. He gives a just-so story: 50,000 changes. Okay, so list them! For a movement that complains of tired evolutionary “just-so stories,” this is a just-so story as well and needs to be carefully laid out, not just baldly stated.
[/quote]
He did list some a few of the required changes, but that was only a short segment amongst many topics. I guess he assumed anyone who made it that far into the video did not need to be schooled. The entire video is worth the time. The entire playlist is worth the time. Berlinski’s book, “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions”, is enlightening, and quite humorous.
Well, people had the stratigraphy worked out already long before anything radiometric came along. Also astronomy corroborates the age of the solar system pretty well with the age of the oldest rocks on earth.
I’m sorry, I really wasn’t clear at all if you thought I was talking about the shape of the drawing. I was talking exclusively about the characteristics of the skeleton.
Source, please? Neither your YouTube video nor the bio page of Gingerich disagrees with the above statements. Nor do I know what “it doesn’t fit” is meant to refer to? Ambulocetus? Are we still talking about the same whale?
Scientists are pretty careful to distinguish, usually, between what they think they know and what they’re reasonably sure of. This is a feature, not a bug.