Creationist response to cetacean femur, leg atavism, and limb bud.

Well if you want to be wrong about everything except marine mammals, this would be exactly the wrong thread to do it on.

Dr. A, please try to avoid such one line posts which add nothing to the discussion. I will be moderating this thread as closely as possible in order to keep the discussion as smooth as possible.This will be the only warning. Do not reply to this message

Hey Byers, That you did. Fair enough.So you acknowledge that marine mammals evolved. That means that you have nothing further to add to this thread. This thread is for those who wish to argue that whales did not evolve from land animals. If you think that they did, you have no role to play here. Please stop posting here. No-one could care less about your guesses, especially in a thread where a creationist member has gone to such efforts to provide evidence for his position. Since you provide none, you have no business posting here. Please stop. You are ruining Aaron's nice thread. If you want to argue that evidence for evolution is evidence against evolution, do it somewhere else.Mutate and Survive

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On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

I don't agree with evolution by selection on mutation.
Rather I see massive diversity, like in the Amazon, as coming from inate triggers in bodies to allow great and instant change.
The example being seals today. tHere are seals with different kinds of walking ability. Their legs are slightly different.
yet if they were covered suddenly by some great movement of sediment and they were living in slightly segregated areas on the beach evolutionists would later say BEHOLD this evolved from that.
Yet we know they lived together at the same time and are not evolving into each other.
Likewise there is no evolution marine mammals evident. Just results from a common time when they were suddenly overthrown by sediment by water .
One is wasting ones time in looking at fossils if they are not from different ages. you must first prove this.

Hi Robert,As has been the case in other threads, you are posting unsupported assertions. Your history is that you distract attention from a thread's topic as attention increasingly focuses on trying to get you to support your assertions, which you never do. For this reason, please stop posting to this thread. Thanks.Your considerate manner of participation is greatly appreciated, and if you would begin providing the rationale and evidence behind your positions you could become a very valuable creationist contributor to EvC Forum.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Granny M, I don't think scientists should be able to mimic in the lab everything that God did and nature did. I only said what I did because your attitude seemed to be that the changes needed to eliminate the limb were rather simple. And that view is over-simplistic. Here's a link to the paper I was referring to: Developmental changes of the fore- and hind-limbs in the fetuses of the southern minke whale, Balaenoptera acutorostrata - PubMedThe whole paper isn't available for free. I got a copy from the author.Here's Edward Babinski's quote regarding that paper: from his popular websiteEd must not have ever read the paper, because it says no such thing. The paper isn't very long - it makes a point of highlighting the development of cartilage in the forelimb at a very early stage - but it says nothing about the development of any cartilage in the hind limb. At its largest state of development, the hind bud is called a small bump. Do you think they needed to understand the chemical basis behind a structure to physically see how it develops? Modern insight into the chemical happenings of the hind bud haven't offered support to the the traditional view of their nature.I haven't done much research into sirenian biology. Do you bring up their pelvic bones because a) you don't think they have any purpose?
or
b) the only way they could have bones like that is if they evolved from a four-legged creature?

jab
jab
uppercut
generalized assertionSome of those old writings aren't the easiest thing to discern. They don't always use the same terminology as they do today.Some things I've stumbled through and I've had to make some adjustments. That's not too bad, given that I don't have a degree in science and have only been studying this particular subject for 3 months or so.What if I'm correct though, and scientists have been wrong about the hind buds for over 100 years? What does that say about their interpretations?Here's the quote from my source: I'll tell you who said it later.Here's a quote from a biologist who works on cetacean anatomy in response to my atavistic legs = hox mutation theory.

Did I tread on your toes?It is simply a fact that you have misinterpreted some of the things you've read. Probity on your part and skepticism on mine would therefore dictate an attitude of caution towards your opinions on what scientists mean when they say things. What if you're not correct? So far it seems more likely. It lacks context. Again, context is lacking. They may very well be Hox mutations. The question then would be whether they produce an atavistic hind flipper or a duplicate front flipper.

I'm used to criticism on this site. Here's the context of my email that he was directly responding to:

Curious. Had it been me I should have pointed out that the hind flippers are anatomically clearly not "multiplying existing" front flippers; that their locations, so far from being "unique", are singularly repetitious; and that it is by no means "parsimonious" to explain piecemeal the several and separate features that evolutionary biology explains at a single stroke. Indeed, I have already pointed this out. These observations seem to me superior to an appeal to anonymous authority.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Hi Aaron, Well good. That means that your comment; seems to be irrelevant. It's not. The changes needed to suppress the limb are far less profound than those needed to create it in the first place. The whales still have all those ancestral genes that allow them to make hind legs. We can see this from the atavisms. All that has happened is that the expression of those genes has changed. This is a comparatively minor change. Obviously all biology is complex, but this is not as big a change as you seem to want it to be. Well you can't expect me to comment on a paper that I can't read. I do notice though that the authors still refer to the hind limb buds as hind limb buds in their abstract. They do not seem to see the problem you see. I also probably lack the knowledge of embryology to fully answer this one to be honest.I'd still like to take a look though. Is your copy of this paper a digital one? If so, I would be grateful if you were to email me a copy. My email address is at the bottom of this post. Well since chemicals are physical, I suppose that one answer is yes. The general point I am trying to make here is that it seems perverse to rely on century old research when more recent research is available, with new methodologies and new data. New research supersedes old research, usually. That is a view that I do not think you have fully supported. I am interested in your thoughts about them because you seem to doubt that the hind limbs of whales are hind limbs. You seem to think that they are supernumerary front limbs (although how you square that with your observation that the pelvis is recognised as an ischium, I don't know, since the two views are quite incompatible). So do Sirenians have supernumerary front limbs too? Exactly where their hind limbs should go? Isn't that a bit of a stretch that the same deformities should occur in two unrelated species? Can your ideas explain Sirenian morphology, or must that be answered separately? What about Pinnipeds? Their hind limbs form a tail. Can your ideas answer that? And then there's the extinct marine reptiles, like plesiosaurs...Is there a general principle at work here? Because I can point to a general principle; they are all examples of tetrapods evolving into an aquatic lifestyle, with their limbs being adapting to match.If you have no general principle you are left with a series of mismatched, piecemeal explanations and that has to look a lot like a set of post hoc rationalisations.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

If someone email's a copy to me at Admin then I will post it here at the site.Edited by Admin, : Add quote.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I see you have been very busy. you've certainly provided me with plenty of homework. Since there's quite a bit of material here, I will tackle a bit at a time.{Spam links deleted - Adminnemooseus}Edited by Adminnemooseus, : See above.

Two problems with this.- Not because they live together and at the same time it means that a species isnt derived from the other. A species could be much older- Having different walking would never prove that it evolved from that species.

Mr. Byers isn't around. The post you are responding to is nearly two years old.