Evolution News' 'Long Story Short' video debuts delightful whale of a webinar

Today Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture hosted a webinar on whale evolution, and it was way oversubscribed. We apologize to anyone who wasn't able to make it into the crowded virtual seminar room. Robert Crowther welcomed biologists Jonathan Wells and Richard Sternberg, and they discussed the new Long Story Short video, "A Whale of an Evolution Tale," and much else. Responding to questions from the audience, they ranged across the thoughts of Theodosius Dobzhansky, David Berlinski, and James Shapiro, microevolution versus macroevolution, the thorny problems of convergent evolution and of waiting times, fruit fly experiments and how echolocation in bats and dolphins differ, and much else. They were joined by a surprise guest, the video's animator, who here goes by a first name only, Evan, for reasons you can imagine: even an animator has to worry that Darwinists will try to destroy him professionally (as they sought to do to Dr. Sternberg).

You can watch Evan's video for yourself now:


The video's point is actually pretty simple. Whales are held up as a model of what unguided evolution can do in a short time: in this case, just 8 million years, or perhaps even half that. The transition from the wolf-like Pakicetus to the familiar modern whale required countless ingenious innovations. One is "counter-current heat exchange system for inter-abdominal testes (kind of a big deal)." But the evidence runs into numerous problems: There doesn't seem to have been anywhere near enough time for blind, groping evolution, fueled by random mutations alone, to have accomplished all the required engineering marvels. Evolutionists claim numerous intermediate fossils, but to them, "intermediate" doesn't mean what it means to most of us — "The fossil evidence is so meager that Darwinists, in order to prove evolutionary ancestry, have to use a slippery definition that no one would accept in other areas of life." A seemingly smooth evolutionary story is far rougher and more confused than Darwin proponents typically are willing to admit, characterized by "chronological inversions," "ghost lineages," "fossils out of the order that supposed to be in," and more.

As the video asks: If this is the best that evolutionists have got, what does that tell you about the strength of the rest of the evidence for their theory?

Evan did a wonderful job of conveying all this in just 10 minutes, packed with humor and remarkable for its lucidity. As Rob Crowther commented at the end of the panel discussion, you will do your friends and family a favor by sharing this widely. And if you missed Evan's first installment in the series, "Is Homology Evidence for Evolution?," see that here: