In his interview, Dr. Berlinski puts forward the argument that generates a paradox for a Darwinian account of whale evolution, as follows:
If you were to take a Chevrolet Corvette built in 1954 and decide you want to make a Nautilus Class submarine out of the thing, [and] give it to a lot of engineers – “Fellas, go do this. Do it for me” – I think it could be done, but we all have a sense of the engineering complexities. To do it would be a big, big, big project. The question I’d like to ask in all of this is: give me a quantitative estimate of how many steps would be required to change that Chevrolet Corvette built in 1954 to a Nautilus Class submarine? I don’t want you to give me a quantitatively precise answer, but I want you to give me a ballpark estimate – say, it’s off by an order of magnitude from what I’m told. And I think if we were talking about Chevrolet Corvettes and Nautilus class submarines, the answer would ballpark be: 50,000 changes, 60,000 changes, maybe 100,000 changes, if it’s feasible at all. I kind of suspect it could be done.
Now, I want the same answer for the transition from a land-dwelling creature to a sea-dwelling creature. How many changes would we need? Now why would I be interested in that number? Let’s call that number the “X” number. And this is the point that the Darwinian community never finds curious. If we knew that number, which is an accessible number – we know enough biology to grasp that number – we could compare it to the fossil record. The fossil record has about ten intermediate fossils between a land-dwelling creature and an ocean-going whale. If there are ten, let’s say the tides of time have buried another hundred – perfectly plausible. But if there are 50,000 required changes, there should also be 50,000 intermediates, according to standard Darwinian doctrine. If there is an inequality, a strong inequality between those numbers – the number of fossils that we observe, padded with the number of fossils we might have observed were it not for the injuries of time, and the number of changes – morphological, cellular, biological, physiological, anatomical – that are required to make that transition, then we could assess the plausibility of what is one of the most interesting Darwinian sequences in the record. That’s never done. That’s just never done. No Darwinian paleontologist has ever said: “We expect there to be 50,000 sequences in the whale transition sequence, because we’ve computed the number of changes that are required. But wouldn’t you think, Darwinian fellow-seekers, that that’s an obvious first step to take in making your scientific claims quantitative – not rigorously quantitative, but ballpark quantitative? It’s not done.
To make matters worse in the Corvette to submarine analogy, each resulting vehicle must be operable and useful.
The many complex adaptations that would need to arise to convert a land mammal to a fully aquatic whale include:
All of this from a series of happy mistakes?
IAW with Genesis 1 all animals were created IAW their kinds meaning God put all the DNA code needed to make every animal that has ever existed. That doesn’t mean every animal we know today was on the Ark, but the DNA code was already present in every animal, that’s not evolution.
Just look at your children and/or siblings and you can see a diverse set of traits that are not obviously present in the two parents, but yet they do indeed contain that DNA whether expressed in their external traits or not.
Nobody denies that evolution/mutations within species happened and is happening - just not trans-mutational evolution. The absence of transitional forms were and will continue to be a huge embarrassment to evolutionists. Even “accelerated equilibrium” won’t explain it. I suspect the reason so many continue to cling to it because the only alternative is creation.
AND be able to reproduce itself!