Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, May 12, 2017, 15:16 (2751 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: A video of the whale metamorphosis from land to aquatic. Note the short 45 second version to save time. These changes require an enormous amount of planning beforehand. It involves visualizing the future form. It requires a mind:
https://aeon.co/videos/watch-as-the-whale-becomes-itself-slowly-slowly-from-land-to-sea...
How does one arrange for the nostrils to go from the snout to the top of the back behind the skull? Planning!

QUOTATION: The resulting animation, Whalevolution, emphasises that a single strand of evolutionary history isn’t characterised by a series of distinct species, but rather, as Charles Darwin put it, an ‘infinitude of connecting links’.

dhw: So what happened? Did the poor old pre-whale have to hang around on land till your God shifted its nostrils? What an amazing turn-around in your thinking! One moment you have your God fully equipping fish with all the bits and pieces necessary BEFORE they step onto dry land, and the next you have your God doing an itsy-bitsy job on the heading-for-water pre-whale, with each stage exquisitely planned until at last he produces the whale he wants – although, wait for it, the one thing he really wants is humans.

Here’s another theory: maybe the fish that stepped onto land, and the animal that stepped into the water, gradually made adjustments to themselves until they had reached the optimum form to suit their new environment.

As usual you've skipped the entire point. A land animal goes through eight or nine stages to become an aquatic animal hugely complicating all aspects of its phenotype with gaps between the stages, not tiny steps. For example, sex requires a specialized vagina, suckling milk with specialized adaptation. I was not supporting the tiresome quoted Darwinism. Difficult transitions require advanced mental planning with an imagination of the future requirements.