Evolutionists? Where did the whale come from?

Question

Where the whale came from?

Charles Darwin, always ready to come up with a theory about everything, explains how the "monstrous whale" originated:

"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."—*Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859 and 1984 editions), p. 184.

Thats what Darwin thought, So that bear was swimming around out in the ocean all that time, till the change came? Can anyone please answer me this, I can’t seem to figure it out?

"As one creationist pamphlet put it, ‘A frog turning instantaneously into a prince is called a fairy tale, but if you add a few million years, it’s called evolutionary science.’ "—*Op. cit., p. 399.

Answer 1

There will be some ignorant evolutionists here that will give you crap answers about this true statement, keep it up brother.

Creationist 10 - 0 Evolutionists

Answer 2

Please don't use the empty rhetoric of interchanging the word theory and hypothesis. It demeans you more than necessary. You're passage is Darwin's comment on someone else's observations that a bear could behave like a baleen whale. He goes on to state how, under the right circumstances, natural selection might change a bear into a whale-like creature. This piece of speculation which Einstein might have called a "thought experiment" merely frames the approach to observation. At no place does Darwin call it a hypothesis to be tested, yet you call it a theory. Even if it were a hypothesis, it would have been disproven by the excellent fossil record displaying the evolution of whales.

Answer 3

the bears or whatever whales came from did not instantly turn into whales.
the whale's anscestors lived in a world where they would be better off if they were aquatic.
the bears or whatever had babies.
all these babies were very slightly different, like happens with human families.
the babies better suited to the water, due to the environment, were more likely to survive.
the babies more likely to survive are more likely to have babies of their own, and therefore pass down the slightly different characteristics that allowed them to survive and have babies.
gradually as the more aquatic bears have more babies and the less aquatic ones dont, a change in the population begins to happen.
over THOUSANDS of years (not the instantaneous transformation described in the propaganda of the creationist pamphlet) the population of bears becomes more like whales than it used to be
and after even more time than that, u wind up with the whales of today
evolution is not instantaneous
it is a VERY slow process, that takes MANY generations

also:
notice the way whales move.
they move like land animals.
their back fin moves up and down like a cheetah or a lion or a bear moves.
the back fins of fish move from side to side.
This suggests that whales are more closely related to land mammals than to fish
And:
im not sure if it is all whales or just one species, but at least one species of whales has short, stubby leg-like appendages, which are too small to notice, except from the skeleton.
These are legs in the same way the human tailbone is a tail, ie they were probably used as legs by the anscestors of the whales, but as they became unnescassary, it was an advantage for them to be smaller, and so they got smaller

Answer 4

You don't get it...read a BIOLOGY book (any college bio 101 will do). It's fine to read the Christian view, but make sure you read SCIENCE books as well, some with simple explanations. No offense, but Darwin is obviously over your head. You can't defend your Creationist views if you don't have a complete understanding of Evolution, and what I've noticed a lot of Creationists doing is using gross oversimplifications of evolutionary theory to explain it away. This does not wash, as it's easy for those that know Evolution well to write off what you're saying. Really try to educate yourself, and try again.
BTW, Darwin was using what he observed around him to POSTULATE what may have occurred to bring about adaptive changes over millennia. He was in no way saying that whales descended from bears. THIS is a gross oversimplification of what Darwin was doing in this example.

Answer 5

Yes, the earliest pioneers in any area of science do have some strange theories. Hippocrates thought malaria was caused by bad air drifting in from the swamp. (That's what "malaria" means - bad air). But he is still the Father of Medical Science. Over time other scientists conduct additional research to sort out some of those early ideas, keeping some, discarding others, modifying still others. We don't honor Darwin for having a 21st century understanding of biological evolution - that would have been impossible - but for laying the foundation upon which others could build in the search for scientific truth.

Answer 6

Evolution takes thousands and thousands of years, and that i doubt a whale can evolve interior the few hours on the main it would be on a coastline, we will not quit whales from evolving to people, using fact they are no longer likely to, apes progressed into people, it incredibly is why we seem a lot like them. No it may no longer probably be using fact they are residing creatures that experience like we do.

Answer 7

Darwin (1859) suggested that whales arose from bears, sketching a scenario in which selective pressures might cause bears to evolve into whales; embarrassed by criticism, he removed his hypothetical swimming bears from later editions of the Origin (Gould 1995).

You have to realize people were not very smart back then. This is the kind of thing we have today.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306458535/edwartbabinth-20

Answer 8

Well the quotation says that this could produce something "as monstrous as a whale." That does not mean that these bears produced whales. There is a big difference.

Answer 9

It fell out of space, where it was created when Arthur Dent accidentally hit the button on the Infinte Improbability Drive on the spaceship Heart Of Gold, trying to get away from missles fired at them by the inhabitants of a dead planet. A bowl of petunias was also created, though no one is quite sure why. (In the book, though, the whale was killed on impact.)

Did that make sense? Neither does creationism.

Answer 10

Mutations. Most mutants don't pass on their genes, but some do. Sometimes those mutations are more fit for the environment than what had come before.

Answer 11

The beautiful thing about a scientist, is that he can admit, and learn from, his mistakes. If only the religious right could do this.