Students ask: “Did whales evolve from land mammals?” – Part I

Fossils are thought of as the evidence at a crime scene that can be used to help construct a case for what may have happened in the past. This is why finding transitional fossils, evolutionary “in-betweens” that document the change of one animal into another, are important for building a convincing case that evolution happened.

However, just like evidence at a crime scene, fossils can be “spun” to fit an observer’s story. Such has been the case for nearly all proposed evolutionary “transitions,” including the famous “land-mammal-to-whale” series displayed in the California 10th grade biology textbook, Biology by Miller & Levine. While admitting that “the history of life [evolution]” is “incomplete”, it assures students that, “The evidence we do have, however, tells an unmistakable story of evolutionary change.”1 However, as we will see, the evidence is far from convincing, and leads the unbiased observer to question the integrity of the whole evolutionary theory.

WhaleEvo.1.001
The types of changes needed for whale evolution are statistically and biologically impossible.WhaleEvo.1.001
Before we discuss the fossil record of whales, we first need to ask ourselves, “Is it possible for a land mammal to transform into a whale?” In order for such a transition to occur, many highly-unlikely changes would need to made to the anatomy of the supposed whale ancestor, including:

Nostrils on the snout to a blowhole on the top of the head.
A tail for stability to a fluke for propulsion.
Fur exchanged for blubber for insulation.
Teeth to baleen [in some whales].
Forelimbs to flippers.2
What are the odds of all of the changes necessary to transform a land mammal into a whale occurring by chance mutations? Dr. Carl Werner, in his book Evolution: The Grand Experiment, calculates the odds conservatively at 1/364 followed by 1,625 zeros, less than the chance of winning the national super-ball lottery for 200 years in a row!3

Clearly, whales could not have evolved, and must have been created specially by an all-wise Creator, just as Genesis has said all along!4