Why Whales are not understood by Creationists (Testable)

@vjtorley,

I should say that sweeping proclamations, about how long it would take to make a specific kind of whale, are not exactly the easiest things to prove.

You assign the good Prof. to the Pythagorean camp. But the point of his presentation is that evolution of whales needs more than natural laws, yes?

From a BioLogos article:

“At BioLogos, we present the Evolutionary Creationism (EC) viewpoint on origins. Like all Christians, we fully affirm that God is the creator of all life—including human beings in his image. We fully affirm that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God. We also accept the science of evolution as the best description for how God brought about the diversity of life on earth.”

"But while we accept the scientific evidence for evolution, BioLogos emphatically rejects Evolutionism, the atheistic worldview that so often accompanies the acceptance of biological evolution in public discussion. Evolutionism is a kind of scientism, which holds that all of reality can in principle be explained by science. In contrast, BioLogos believes that science is limited to explaining the natural world, and that supernatural events like miracles are part of reality too."

Does anyone know where these data and analyses are published? I could not find anything on Google Scholar or PubMed or bioRxiv, but maybe I missed it.

Which data and analyses are you referring to, Steve?

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Oh sorry, the ones that Sternberg’s claim are based on. Apparently he argued that “the timespan of whale evolution is too short.” Rates of evolution are estimated using specific quantitative approaches that are themselves the focus of ongoing research. A responsible professional scientist would not make a claim like that one without having actually done some analysis.

But maybe someone else did the work, and Sternberg was discussing it. Or maybe Sternberg didn’t really make that claim, and instead was just asking a question.

Well, Vincent Torley would probably know, since he posted the links to the Dr. Sternberg’s talks. @vjtorley Do you know?

I just listened to the first podcast. It contains no analysis, and consists solely of gee-whizzing about an interesting evolutionary transition. (The gee-whizzing is completely understandable.) Sternberg makes no claim other than “not enough time” and all of the remaining content is a recitation of the physiology and anatomy of basilosaurids. It is a textbook example of “the argument from personal incredulity.” If anyone has done any actual scientific analysis of the evolutionary trajectory and its time frame, it was omitted from the interview.

Maybe the argument is advanced in part 2?

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You could try it.

The argument is made in part 2. It involves no analysis at all. Instead it raises standard ID talking points (claims of need for coordinated mutations, most centrally) without any specific genetic data from cetaceans or anywhere else.

The podcasts advance no analysis and therefore no actual new claim beyond “I don’t see how this could have happened.” There is no clear argument to engage or refute regarding whale evolution.

In the real world of evolutionary genetics, there are vigorous efforts to address questions like the one Sternberg raises. There are plenty of unanswered questions.

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I think the real purpose of those links is to sell the “Living Waters” DVD.

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Hi George,

You might want to have a look at this: Whale Evolution vs. Population Genetics - Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson - YouTube

It’s an 11-minute video in which Dr. Sternberg and Paul Nelson explain their position very clearly. What they’re arguing is that whale evolution required several different co-ordinated mutations. For example, whales have internal testicles, but these require a cooling system to be in place,or whales won’t be able to reproduce successfully. However, the cooling system only makes sense if there are internal testicles already in place. So the two had to appear at the same time. And there are many other things that needed to be co-ordinated as well. Sternberg and Nelson then cite Durrett and Schmidt’s 2008 paper, “Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution” (see Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution - PubMed ) which basically says (according to Sternberg & Nelson) that if you need two co-ordinated mutations to occur, then you’ll have to wait for over 100 million years for them to occur together. Since whales evolved over 10 million years at most, whale evolution refutes the hypothesis that whales appeared by an unguided, incremental, Darwinian process. That’s the kind of evolution they’re taking aim at.

It seems to me that their argument would collapse if there turned out to be a single gene regulating both the development of cooling systems and internal testes. I’m not sure, but the INSL3 gene might be one such candidate. What do you think?

Re INSL3, please see here:

http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/jbsc/035/01/0027-0037

@vjtorley

Such issues are well above my pay grade. But it is the overall context that I find interesting.

It sounds like a good discussion for two experts to have.

What is it that you think can be resolved here on these BioLogos boards?

I imagine that the changes would have occurred gradually and in parallel, consistent with what is know about evolution. Just looking on google, I note elephants also have internal testes. I never realized that I had never seen an elephant scotum, because they don’t exist. Evidently it sort of depends on the relative risks of exposure vs cooling, and in fact scotums probably evolved from animals with internal testes.

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You are right. There are actually a lot of terrestrial animals with internal testes, including hedgehogs, tapirs, moles, rhinos, anteaters, etc. There is a hypothesis that certain motions like galloping and bounding put too much pressure on the testicles, making their externalization an advantage. I found this informative article in Slate: The Scrotum is Nuts

Great article, beaglelady. Amazing what you never knew you didn’t know.

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Has anybody in the ID movement discussed any of this with whale evolution expert Philip Gingerich? His web page on whales is here.

@gbrooks9

Did you know that Paul Nelson is a YEC?

With the level of redundancy observed in mammalian systems that regulate gene expression, I would suspect that it is quite unlikely that a single gene is responsible for the regulation of either system, let alone both. Certainly, it is possible that INSL3 is involved in regulating both processes, but INSL3 works in coordination with a variety of other regulatory factors such as Inhibin B, AMH, SF-1, and testosterone. INSL3 is also an important factor in fish (and maybe other animals), suggesting a rather conserved function and not specialized for whales.

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The cooling system is a countercurrent exchanger. It’s cool (heh) but it’s not highly complex; it’s basically just proximity of veins and arteries, with outgoing and incoming blood kept close. Don’t get me wrong: it’s interesting. But it’s not an elaborate “cooling system”–it’s just an altered arrangement of blood vessels so that cool blood from extremities flows near testes in cetaceans. The system did not have to be invented by cetaceans, since it’s a conserved mechanism in all mammals, used most famously in the kidney (to concentrate urine) but also in the skin and the core. This has been known for a very long time. Its genetic basis is just being understood: a 2015 paper in Developmental Cell showed that a signaling protein called Apelin is necessary for the artery/vein patterning that creates countercurrent exchange. Mice lacking the protein (or its receptor) have problems with thermoregulation, and this tells you that the suggestion of a unique cetacean “cooling system” is wrong (more accurately, it’s uninformed).

APJ Regulates Parallel Alignment of Arteries and Veins in the Skin

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Thanks very much Steve! I’m also suspicious of talk about several mutations having to occur at the same time. That’s a familiar refrain from the ID movement. There is usually plenty of existing variation in populations of animals.

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