Biological complexity: how to make a whale (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 30, 2016, 02:02 (3069 days ago) @ dhw

Whales developed from land mammals with enormous changes in all parts of the animals. Studies show n ot enough time elapsed for all the mutations needed:-http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/06/whale_of_a_tale102954.html- "Richard Sternberg considers the number of adaptations required to be "unfathomably complicated" to allow a land animal to live entirely in an aquatic environment. The film lists just a few categories of adaptations for humpback whales:-•Respiratory system-•Locomotive structures-•Musculoskeletal system-•Dentition-•Urinary system-•Cardiopulmonary system-•Thermoregulation-•Sensory organs-•Reproductive organs-
"You can imagine any of these outward changes requiring thousands of genetic changes. "Just think of all the parameters that would have to be modified," Sternberg says, "and then multiply that by, I don't know -- a thousandfold, or more than that. That's the scale of the problem that you're dealing with." In the Q&A feature of the film Icons of Evolution, David Berlinski tried to quantify the number of morphological changes necessary to turn a cow into a whale (like turning a car into a submarine), and stopped counting at 50,000. -***-"In Living Waters, Sternberg showed mathematically that it would take longer to expect just two cooperative mutations to occur than the maximum time expected for the entire evolution of a whale (100 million years vs 9 million years)." -Comment: When chance mutations are considered, there is no way to make a whale without intelligent planning. Only a planning mind can do this.