I am sorry for your inability to read, but I don’t know what to do about it. Darwin is clearly presenting a scenario, using an observation of a bear, for the pathway by which whales might have evolved. But the bear is not used there as a suggestion for the ancient ancestor of whales. It’s a modern bear, not a fossil bear. Darwin doesn’t suggest that whales evolved from fossil bears either. At most, he suggests that a habit of swimming to eat insects might have arisen in some unspecified whale ancestor. Now it happens that Darwin’s suggestion is wrong, since whales didn’t begin as aquatic insect-eaters. But the example remains useful as a plausible pathway toward such an animal, an example of how selection might operate to favor changes, with behavior preceding morphology.
In that case, you too are wrong. Darwin never suggested that whales were or even might be descended from bears.
Technically the vide doesn’t even claim Darwin thought whales actually did evolve from bears, it really does just mock him for even suggesting it could happen.
The video also blatantly misrepresents the fossil record of whale evolution by claiming that paleontologists think all the different morphospecies in the whale fossil record are thought to be on the same line of direct descent.
This is just completely wrong. The video then dishonestly quotemines Jerry Coyne because he uses the phrase “chronologically ordered series of fossils” on page 48 of his book Why Evolution Is True, but completely neglects to mention how he actually explains the the dates and the status of each fossil on the following pages.
And did you notice the images in the video are basically traced copies of the illustrations in Coyne’s book? I would imagine that violates copyright if he didn’t get permission, right?
The video also utterly misrepresents the paper by Durrett and Schmidt (2008), suggesting it showed that millions of years are required for just 2 beneficial mutations to occur. In fact, the quoted timescales for fruit flies and humans are estimates of the time required for either 2 neutral or 1 neutral and 1 beneficial mutation to occur, respectively, and not just any 2 mutations - 2 mutations that are prespecified and coordinated. It’s the difference between citing the odds of specifically that person there winning the lottery versus the odds that someone wins the lottery.
…which he didn’t do.
I don’t really see any distinction between describing a possibility, and saying it could happen in principle. Isn’t that the same thing?
Sure. But Darwin said neither. He wasn’t suggesting even the possibility that whales had evolved from bears. He was suggesting that bears, under certain conditions, might evolve to become “as monstrous as a whale”. This implies a potential scenario for whale evolution, but that scenario wouldn’t involve bears.
Ah yes I see what you mean. He was just making a point about the scale of change, and drawing from an example of a selective pressure that could be similar to a “starting point” for whale evolution, acting on a terrestrial mammal.
Pakicetus is a whale
Also:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534714000846
Indeed. And I suspect they must have gotten their info from Jonathan Wells, who also misuses that identical paper. In my review of Zombie Science, I happened to use the same analogy you did:
"He gives eight million years to complete the terrestrial/aquatic transition. That’s questionable, but for the sake of argument let’s accept it. He then tells us that we have information on the rate at which mutations can arise and become fixed in populations – that it takes a few million years to fix two such mutations in a population much larger than that of whales, or a hundred million years to do the same in a population like that of humans or whales! Well, that does it – plainly eight million years isn’t enough to do the job.
“Except, of course, that in this case he’s flatly dishonest. The study he cites for this timing, by Durrett and Schmidt, relates to how long it takes to obtain and then fix two SPECIFIC mutations, chosen in advance by the researchers, in a population of fruit flies. That number isn’t remotely comparable to what Wells is using it for – this is like asking, “will anyone win the Powerball lottery this week,” and answering the question by saying that the chance of winning the Powerball is one in 292 million. True, if there is only one ticket, but that wasn’t the question: that’s not the chance that the Powerball will be won by someone; it’s the chance it’ll be won by you. Wells is many orders of magnitude off, and a biochemist of my acquaintance, confronted with Wells’ claim, responded: ‘A few million years to fix a mutation? Where did that come from? Even with a weak selection coefficient, 1000 generations would be sufficient. Also, there can be several mutations undergoing selection at the same time. Hundreds of selective mutations can be fixed in the span of just 1 million years.’”
One of the most notable features of creationism is the way that its errors never, ever get corrected. They just get repeated.
Darwin actually says what he’s talking about, from the beginning of the paragraph from which the quote was mined: “I will now give two or three instances of diversified and of changed habits in the individuals of the same species. When either case occurs, it would be easy for natural selection to fit the animal, by some modification of its structure, for its changed habits, or exclusively for one of its several different habits.”
Indeed, Darwin does, and indeed, it’s only a hypothetical example.
But what really surprises me about this particular creationist tale is that, as much as they’d like to make fun of Darwin with it, it’s surprisingly close to what happened. A semi-aquatic animal with a specialized feeding strategy had adaptations to its dentition and locomotion, and what was a land predator became a fully aquatic predator. Yes, it was an ungulate, not a bear (hence a small-c “carnivore,” not a member of Carnivora), and the specialized feeding strategy seems to have gone from ambush predator/fish eater to fish eater, then (in the case of baleen whales) to filter-feeder-from-hell, rather than going from rather toothy land omnivore to baleen filter-feeding, but holy cow (or whale) – Darwin understood in broad terms what might drive such a transition, and we now know that in those broad terms he was right. So, what’s so darned funny?
Good to know it’s in Zombie Science, I had only checked The Icons of Evolution for the claims in this video. I know for a fact that the video maker uses Wells extensively as a source, partly because he has another video on the DI YouTube channel going after the concept of homology that is just a paraphrased version of one of the chapters in Icons, and partly because he’s clearly in direct contact with people like Wells at the DI. The premiere event for this very video included a Q&A with Sternberg and Wells over Zoom: Zoom Webinar with Wells, Sternberg on Whale Evolution; Join Us on April 23! | Evolution News
By the way, in earlier discussions here I got quite a bit of pushback from people when I insisted that the use of the Durrett and Schmidt paper was a clear example of dishonesty on Wells’ part. The most bizarre suggestions, including a claim that Wells might have simply misunderstood the paper – not a reasonable possibility as this is crystal clear – came forth.
The feeling seemed to be that we need to be nice to people like Wells so as to find common ground with them and to try to engage them in a productive discussion. But, of course, people like Wells will take whatever credibility you extend to them, and use it as a weapon as they attack the credibility of actual science. The only reaction to something like Zombie Science MUST, in my view, be an aggressive combination of debunking, pointing, and laughing – anything else gives these charlatans an excuse for misleading others and enhances their credibility as they do so.
5 posts were split to a new topic: A Young Paul Nelson?
Incidentally, I’m surprised at all the hate and ridicule for Darwin and scientists in general. Is the DI now officially coming out as anti-science?
I’ve never understood this. Because all of them hold to some type of evolution and ancestry. So they just trash the guy that made many of the discoveries their models rely on. I think it’s just them pandering to their audience. Their audience think Charles Darwin is the devil.
Reminiscent of the Gettier Problem. 
One fewer than the number Posts and comments required to finally change your mind.