Evolution: whale teeth and baleens; another article (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 06, 2018, 18:26 (2177 days ago) @ dhw

QUOTE: “So sometime around 30 million years ago, when a changing ocean environment probably led to a surge in planktonic organisms, whales picked up a new technique — swimming through a mass of many millions of small critters.”
The newly discovered prehistoric whale Maiabalaena nesbittae, which lived about 33 million years ago, didn’t have teeth or baleen. To Pyenson, this suggests that the ancestors of today’s baleen whales totally gave up on teeth in favor of suction feeding, setting the stage for the rise of baleen a few million years later."

DAVID: All by Darwin magic, of course. what happened takes a lot of planning and design. This discussion suggests that baleens came from hair follicle genes. How did they get to work from within the jaw?

dhw: And this discussion also suggests that the whole process took place in response to environmental change, as opposed to your theory that your God preprogrammes or dabbles change in advance of environmental change. Two hypotheses for you: 1) your God took away the teeth of pre-baleen whales, told them to go away and suction feed, and then a few million years later dabbled with all of them to insert baleens, because all this was essential to keep life going until he could produce humans; 2) pre-baleen whales took to suction feeding in response to the changing ocean environment and so they didn’t need their teeth, which then disappeared, and a few million years later the cell communities used their (possibly God-given) intelligence to adapt existing structures to improve the whale’s method of feeding.

Of course a Darwin-based article will present your line of reasoning, which always avoids the need for design engineering.