Animals with bad design.

Hi, Aaron. It does seem kind of contradictory, doesn't it?I'm not really a fan of these arguments, because I can't really imagine that a universe that was different would be very interesting to a designer.Still, it does make me wonder why the Designer wanted the world to be like this. For example, things like why all animals with mammary glands should also have four limbs; and why all animals with feathers should also lay eggs.----- You're assuming that the world has to work the way it does in order to argue that the world has to be the way it is.We all agree with you that the system we live with works rather well; but I worry about people who don't at least question the morality of being who designs a system in which living things have to kill other living things in order to eat, particularly when this being is also believed to love and care about its creations.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. Good point: this may actually be true for some whales, but I'm pretty sure most whales still have four limbs.----- There are also animals that don't have mammary glands, but do have four limbs.There's a reason I said the sentence in the order I did.----- No, I don't killing animals is morally wrong. There's a difference between living inside a system that requires killing and creating a system that requires killing.As you correctly stated, those of us living in this world have to kill something in order to eat, so we can hardly be faulted for killing.On the other hand, God didn't have to make killing a requirement, but He did, so He clearly can be faulted for that.And please notice that I said, "...at least question the morality of a being who..." You're free to make whatever moral decisions you feel are appropriate, and I'm not interested in challenging you on that: but if you're not even going to consider the possibility that it might not have been moral to make a system in which success requires killing, then I don't trust that you are making an honest effort to make informed moral decisions.----- You're still assuming that the universe has to work the way it does in order to argue that it must be the way it is.Isn't it God who designed the universe such that photosynthesis has these energetic limits? What prevented Him from making photosynthesis energetically sufficient to power the metabolisms of animals?Edited by Bluejay, : skipped a word.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. Isn't immortality also an aspect of perfection as described in the Bible?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. But God gets to decide what the physics are! If He had designed the system such that photosynthesis was not energetically limited, then the lack of energetic limits to photosynthesis would not defy the physics of the system.You have to assume that the system must work the way it does in order to make this into an argument that the system must be the way it is. This assumption is not justified when we posit that the designer is responsible for the system working the way it does.----- There's really no need to get this technical about limbs: it was just a simple example of a greater point.When I brought up limb number, I was thinking more along the lines of this: And, in the bird example was thinking in this direction: The point I was trying to illustrate is that nature has many examples of strong correlations between sets of characteristics that don't seem to have a real reason to be correlated with each other. It seems that the characteristics of an organism are determined more by a sort of taxonomic template (e.g., "mammal" or "bird") than by a functional template (e.g. "herbivore" or "scavenger").Everything we know about designers suggests that they design things for their function.
Everything we know about biology suggests that they are not designed around their function, but around their allegiance to specific categories.----- The "bad design" argument isn't that every trait of every organism should be a superlative adaptation without limitations, but that function, rather than taxonomy, should dictate design.I'll put it in familiar terms. The common saying is that form follows function; but, in biology, function seems to follow form.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Barbara. In all honesty, I don't find that surprising at all: I almost never know what you're talking about.----- Let's do some simple math.Let's say that, at some point in time, there are 1 million species on Earth. Let's say that every species lives for about 2 million years, and gradually divides into 2 species during that time. Let's also say that, for each species, 1 of its 2 descendant species will go extinct.This means that, every 2 million years, 1 million new species emerge, and 1 million of the total species pool go extinct.After 2 million years, there are 1 million extinct species and 1 million extant (living) species.
After 4 million years, there are 2 million extinct and 1 million extant.
After 10 million years, there are 5 million extinct and 1 million extant.
After 100 million years, there are 50 million extinct and 1 million extant.So, do you see how the number of extinct species accumulates over time, while the number of extant species does not? This means that, as we go further forward in time, the number of extant species will become a smaller and smaller portion of the total number of species that have ever existed, even if the number of extant species doesn't change much across time.I don't know whether 99.9% is a correct figure or not (it's pretty much just a guess), but, whatever the case, there are certainly many, many, many more evolutionary lineages that have gone completely extinct than have survived until today.This is a very simple and obvious conclusion, and it certainly doesn't contradict the idea that every species descended from a pre-existing species.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron.Good to see you back. I'm not very impressed with Jerry Coyne, either: I saw him in person last year (promoting his new book), and I felt like he gave a poor talk. I didn't buy the book.----- I wasn't really interested in getting this technical about what is a limb and what isn't, but, I suppose there's no point running from it anymore.This idea that the cetacean "pelvis" is a vestigial limb isn't just based on a presupposition that evolution has occurred. There are also embryological studies done that show that those little "nubs" on cetacean skeletons start out as limb buds that look identical to the limb buds that later develop into the hind limbs of other mammals.There is also the small matter of fossilized whales in which the tiny "pelvis" and tiny "femur" are attached to a tiny "tibia" and "fibula," which are then attached to a set of tiny "metatarsals" and "tarsals" and "phalanges." It is decidedly less rational to deny that this structure is a "leg."See here for a good explanation of the evidences that the whale's "pelvis" is actually a pelvis, and that its "femur" is actually a femur. That page also contains numerous links to other resources on the topic.So, Granny's comment about cobbling parts together is in reference to the observation that the structure for supporting whale genitalia seems to have been made from a mammalian pelvis, rather than custom-made for the role it was intended to play.----- I should point out that we expect whale to have unique physical characteristics not found in other animals. The Theory of Evolution is, after all, a theory of change, and, if species didn't have unique characteristics, it would be hard to suggest that any change happened.Also, many of these unique traits are just variations on mammalian or tetrapod traits. For example: Mammary glands: That whales have these at all is telling.
Blowholes: These are just are displaced nostrils. You can actually watch them gradually move from the tip of the muzzle to the top of the head as you go from Ambulocetus, through Rhodocetus and Basilosaurus to modern whales.
Neck: Although cetacean necks are short, they still have 7 cervical vertebrae, like all mammals (except sloths and manatees).
Teeth: Although cetacean teeth are simple and conical, they still have deep sockets and innervations like mammal teeth.All of these characteristics suggest that God took a mammal and made it into a marine animal, rather than custom-designed a marine animal specifically as a marine animal.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, AaronYou sure are more fun to debate with than other creationists: I hope you stick around.Also, I can't really top Dr Adequate in practically any way, but I still want to participate, so here I go: Also interestingly, Basilosaurus is considered to be an actual whale. This means that some whales have hind limbs that seem to be homologous with the hind limbs of non-cetacean mammals, and some just have a tiny bone structure with nubbins on it that seems to be homologous with the pelvis of whales that do have hind limbs.And, going backwards in time, we see whale hind limbs slowly converge on mammal hind limbs in morphology. Surely this should be an obvious clue that whale hind limbs "shrunk" over time into the little nubbins that they are today.----- What "technical bone analysis" would you have us do?
For that matter, what kinds of "technical bone analyses" do you think there are?
What characteristics of femora and pelves would you have us examine to tell whether a given bone is a femur or pelvis?
How would you have us examine these characteristics?Isn't the homologous development of limb buds on embryos of whales and of land mammals just such a characteristic?
Isn't the observation that whale fossils from further and further back in time have hind limbs that are more and more similar to the hind limbs of terrestrial mammals also just such a characteristic?How much more technical do we need to get?----- Why should whales have mammal features at all?
Why live birth and mammary glands? Why lungs? Why 7 neck vertebrae?These are traits that are completely unrelated to the aquatic lifestyle of the whale. In fact, some of those mammalian traits (e.g. lungs) are traits that make the whale's aquatic lifestyle more difficult and less effective than the alternatives.It's like trying to power a car with a propeller or sails, and pointing out all the beautiful design features that make it more suitable for land travel than airplanes or boats as evidence that it's a good design for a car.----- Why must it be a mammal? Surely you don't think "mammal" is the optimal design for a marine animal?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. I'm very skeptical of this argument, for a few reasons:

1. By restricting your analysis to "equivalently shaped" organisms, you've introduced an artificial constraint that holds no meaning for the comparison that's being run. There is no conceivable reason why the Designer had to have an animal with that specific shape. An animal shaped like a manta ray could also do the same job (such animals do, in fact, do the same job).
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2. I think you're mixing toothed whales in with baleen whales to make the case the whales can occupy more territory than whale sharks. In actuality, I don't think baleen whales dive any deeper than whale sharks or manta rays, so this is false comparison. It would be more proper to compare a toothed whale to another predator, such as a "classical" shark or even a giant squid. These animals are generally thought to be able to dive at least as deep as sperm whales (though I'm not sure anybody actually knows how deep any of these animals dive), and can obviously stay down there much longer. So, again, the mammal-like features of whales do not seem to afford them any advantages in terms of the depths they can plumb.
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   However, it seems that manta rays and whale sharks are restricted to warm waters, so it's possible that there is a thermoregulatory constraint on these plankton-feeders that whales have overcome. This could feasibly support the notion that whales are a better design for cold-water plankton feeders, but it still doesn't explain why they had to have mammal features.
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3. I think you're also mixing a bunch of things together that don't really seem to be related. For instance, I'm not sure what a large brain has to do with filter feeding. And, I'm skeptical of the idea that lungs and warm-bloodedness are correlated. I'm also skeptical of the idea that warm-bloodedness is a particularly important characteristic of the design of plankton-feeding organisms.

----- But "bulges" don't come and go willy-nilly: they come in go in the exact same pattern for all tetrapods!----- You've seriously misunderstood how animal development works. You've read somewhere that Fgf8 has a number of functions, and then, upon seeing that Fgf8 is in the limb buds, you conclude that limb buds are important for the function of Fgf8. This is not true. Furthermore, Fgf8 apparently does all of these things in mouse and human embryos too; so, once again, all you've uncovered is more homology with mammals.----- Fgf8 is involved in the building of limbs, Aaron.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. Every scientific name promotes a theory. The name "Basilosaurus" also promotes a theory, but doesn't constrain what we think about that animal.----- We refer to this as a "consilience of evidence." Pakicetus is in the right timeframe and the right geographical location and of the right morphology to bridge the gap between whales and hoofed mammals. When we find a series of fossils that fit the evolutionary model chronologically, geographically and morphologically, it makes perfect sense to argue that they support the evolutionary model.And, "a few similar ear bones" is understating it. Don't you find it curious that the only time a whale-like ear bone has ever been found in a terrestrial mammal, it fits nicely (chronologically and geographically) into a series of fossils bridging the gap between hoofed mammals and whales?----- This is quite an astounding irony. You were just complaining about terminology being used to advance an argument, and now you're using terminology to advance your argument.You apparently see the word "hoof" and envision a horse, with a single hoof on each foot. This is simply not the case! Hooves are found at the tips of digits. In the case of Pakicetus there are either 3 or 4 digits (I'm not entirely clear), each with a distinct little "hoof" at the tip of them.These "hooves" don't seem to be all that different from claws. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only real reason we call them "hooves" rather than "claws" is because phylogenetic analyses indicate that they are related to the hooves of ungulates.----- You realize that this is just a description of the shapes of the bones, right?
What "analysis" do you think has happened here?Edited by Bluejay, : Reworded my ' "Basilosaurus" promotes a theory' bit after Dr A's comments about it.Edited by Bluejay, : Spacing.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Dr A. I agree: I was trying to acknowledge that. I suppose I should be more obvious next time.----- But we believe it: we consider it a whale despite it being named a lizard. I presented it as evidence that, while we do make names to promote theories, we don't accept theories simply because of names.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. Yeah, I read that Wiki article, too.I just got my baccalaureate in biology a couple years ago, and, on multiple occasions, I was advised rather strongly to avoid the terms "warm-blooded" and "cold-blooded," because they don't actually mean anything and aren't used consistently by biologists.----- "Warm-bloodedness" actually has little to do with why an animal can or cannot survive in a given climate zone. It only has to do with internal temperature, which only becomes a problem if it becomes so low that ice crystals begin to form, or so high that heat damage occurs.Interestingly, many "cold-blooded" animals have found ways to prevent ice crystals from forming even when their body temperature becomes very low (e.g., antifreeze proteins), allowing them to survive at much lower temperatures than whales can manage. Also, at very deep depths, water pressures are so high that ice crystals can't form anyway, so deep-sea "cold-blooded" animals don't have to have antifreeze adaptations.My assessment, then, is that there really isn't a good reason why a tuna, or a manta ray, or a whale shark couldn't have been made to survive water as cold as whales can survive, and to therefore take on the role of the whale.----- Insects have some pretty effective genitalia-locking mechanisms. Damselflies, for instance, have multi-part pincers/grabs that allow them to lock on to their mates pretty solidly and prevent other males from stealing them away. These would likely be quite effective on whales, too---I suspect they would work better than what Basilosaurus and Dorudon had---and there would be little mistaking them for tetrapod limbs.A sucker of some sort that fit over the vulva would also be quite effective: it would not only prevent disconnection, but also keep the area protected from the environment in an otherwise rather vulnerable moment.A curious observation about sexual claspers is that they tend to be made out of parts that already exist in the group of organisms. For instance, in sharks, claspers are made of piscine pectoral fins. In whales, they're made of tetrapod hind limbs. In cephalopods, they're made of tentacles (well, they are tentacles). In damselflies (and in spiders, actually), they're made of exoskeletal sclerites.My assessment is that suckers or fin-claspers or sclerites would have worked just as well in basilosaurs as they do in cephalopods, sharks and damselflies; and would likely outperform the limb-claspers of basilosaurs, anyway.Edited by Bluejay, : pluralize the verb!

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Your patience, thoroughness and savvy are commendable. Thank you for making this an interesting debate. Now, let me ask you how this makes them different from what are considered limb buds in other tetrapods? Don't they perform these same functions in tetrapods? Don't they also appear at comparable stages in development, and grow in the same bodily locations, in both cetaceans and tetrapods?They still seem to be homologous structures, albeit homologous structures from which some components have been lost.----- Ah, I see your point.However, given that the lack of these proteins is probably the actual reason why whales have no hind limbs, I don't think it's such a big deal that whale limb buds don't have them.-----{Added by Edit: I believe I replied to the wrong message. Sorry if that threw you off.}Edited by Bluejay, : Addition (marked)

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. I agree with you: the term "vestigial" implies evolution. It doesn't technically have to, but there's really little point in arguing otherwise.----- There are still some problems with this reasoning.First, body heat isn't really that important. Most animals in the Arctic and Antarctic spend their entire lives with their body temperature equal to the temperature of the cold water around them. Hypothermia is only really a serious problem when it causes the formation of ice crystals.Second, body size isn't really that important, either. A school of herring can substitute just fine for a whale, and, due to a higher reproductive rate, they turnover biomass much faster, meaning that, overall, they can probably be fed on and sustain more predators and scavengers than whales.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. We expect differences, because the Theory of Evolution is fundamentally about the differences between species. The similarities, however, are key to understanding what these differences mean.If two species are only similar in ways that are functionally significant, then we can chalk up the similarities to common design or common adaptation. We don't really have much to say on the differences at this point, but we could easily speculate that they, too, have something to do with function.But, if two species are similar in ways that are functionally superfluous, or even functionally inferior to other available options, then we need to look to something other than function to explain why they are the way they are.Combining common descent with evolution leads us to an explanatory framework that beautifully accounts for both the similarities and the differences.
Intelligent design, however, leaves us with a bafflingly quirky designer and the assumption that we'll soon realize that things we currently think are inferior are actually the best fit for the role they are intended to play (which we'll also discover in the future).I'm not saying that it's entirely impossible that we'll get to that point, but don't you agree that it sounds absurdly sketchy?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Aaron. Me too: it's been fun. ----- This is complicated by the observation that tuna can actually swim faster than whales, despite having lower body temperature, lower metabolism and thus, lower chemical efficiency, than whales. So, even thought there is a correlation between metabolism and swimming speed, it isn't a direct correlation.----- Sure, I'll grant that whales have a more efficient metabolism, and are apparently quite fast swimmers.But, just like with body heat and body size, I have to ask why speed is important (this must be getting annoying for you: sorry). Most plankton-feeders apparently do just fine without blazing speeds or high metabolisms, so I'm not clear why this is a particularly important trait for the ecological niche of whales.But, even if I grant that warm-bloodedness is an essential part of the whale's purpose (which I'm not actually willing to do yet), why does it just so happen that so many of the other essential parts of the whale's purpose (e.g., mammary glands, a pelvis, live birth, lungs, hair, etc.) also coincide with the essential parts of the purposes of land mammals? It's too much coincidence for me to give any credibility to the idea that these features are required for both types of organisms' purposes.----- I have a hard time believing that the purpose of whales is to feed benthic scavengers. If whales were replaced by manta rays, and a much larger number and diversity of manta rays is required to consume the same amount of plankton, the total biomass falling to the ocean floor would likely be comparable.Sure, the exact makeup of the benthic detritivore community would be different ("manta falls" would be quite different in size and distribution from "whale falls"), but there's no reason to think it would all collapse just because the Designer used manta rays instead of whales.-----You're probably noticing by now that this is an extremely easy debate for me: I can literally keep backing up and asking you, "Why is X so important?" and "Why not Z?" ad infinitum. I realize that it's not reasonable or fair to expect you to be able to produce better than hypothetical or speculative answers to these questions, but that's kind of the nature of the claim that whales are the optimal design for the role they play in the ecosystem.The trouble with the "good design" arguments for Intelligent Design (and with optimality arguments, in general) is that you really just have to assume optimality, because you never really know if a more optimal system is possible. As such, optimality allows too many escape clauses: if it's found that the system is not optimal when currently-known variables are incorporated into the analysis, we can just speculate that some currently-unknown variable accounts for the difference. So, we get stuck in a cycle of incorporating more and more new variables in response to more and more criticisms of the optimality argument, and we'll eventually just have to either give up the optimality argument, or give up the criticism of it and just let it be.A common creationist criticism of science is the use of "Man's limited knowledge and understanding" to form opinions and hypotheses about what we don't know or haven't studied yet. And, it's true that we don't know what new thing we're going to learn in the future that might demonstrate the optimality of the mammalian whale design, but we can't keep making decisions and forming opinions based on what we might find in the future, because we might find any number of outlandish things.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.