A Tale of Whale Evolution

Genesis 1:21
“So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”

London’s famous Natural History Museum features an enormous gallery, where, among other large creatures, you can see a life-size blue whale hanging from the ceiling.

On a mezzanine, overlooking this gallery, a display can be seen, which purports to provide evidence for the evolution of the whale from a group of land animals, called mesonychids. One display contains three skulls. The first is a mesonychid skull. The second is of ambulocetus—a supposed intermediate form. This word comes from the Latin, and means “walking whale”. The third fossil skull on display is that of a dolphin. The implication is that these skulls illustrate a linear evolution of the whale. One would expect, therefore, that the first fossil would be the oldest.

It is actually the ambulocetus that has the greatest evolutionary age. So the display shows asymmetric error bars for these ages. The ambulocetus is shown to be one of the first of its kind, while the mesonychid is assumed to be one of the last. Thus, the colored error bars show the bulk of the mesonychid timeline as being before that of the ambulocetus, with some overlap. Their justification for this arrangement is that this is the order of evolution. So evolution is assumed, in order to justify the order of display of the fossils, and the display is then offered as evidence of evolution. This is circular reasoning.

The Bible gives us a much clearer, unambiguous account, relating that whales were created on Day Five of the creation week—a day before land animals. 

We are amazed, once again, when we consider a creature like the whale. We know that You made these beautiful, enormous creatures, Lord, and we stand in awe at Your handiwork. Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Encyclopædia Britannica, , accessed 04/26/2017. Image: American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY; License: Creative Commons Share-Alike 2.0 Generic