Hi Bluejay, I hope you and yours are well.
It doesn't have any skeletal structure equivalent to a whale's rudimentary pelvis,
Well, except for it's, y'know, pelvis.
I'm aware that supernumerary limbs exist, but I don't think that they do creationists much good here; to form an extra limb, an organism must first have the genes that code for hind limbs. I don't see any reason for whales to have those under AOKid's theory. I seem to recall seeing something about whales having those genes, but I've lost the link.
To be clear, I would not characterise this as a knockdown argument against AOKid's position. I see it more as an absence of a very convenient piece of evidence that could support his ideas. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist in any of the countless domestic animals with which we are so very familiar. It doesn't destroy his argument, but it sure is inconvenient.
I tried telling him several times that a consistent pattern in data trumps the low quality of the individual data points, but he wasn't buying that: he thinks it's better to look at trees than at the whole forest.
I hear ya. Exactly how much evidence are we supposed to have about whales? How good might we expect the evidence to be with a sparsely populated marine creature? "Not great" would be my answer. And yet we have some examples of limb atavism in cetaceans. Domestic species on the other hand we can observe in their billions, yet I've never seen any weird flank outgrowths that could be compared to whatever-the-heck AOKid thinks these appendages are.
I dunno. It's food for thought.
Mutate and Survive
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