For those who haven’t listened to it, I encourage UD readers to check out The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski. I paraphrase some of his comments below the fold.
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The whale, which is a mammal after all… If its origins were land-based originally, we have some crude way of assessing the scope of the project of transformation. Let’s put it in vividly accessible terms: You’ve got a cow. You want to teach it how to live all of its life in the open ocean, still retaining its air-breathing characteristics. What do you have to do from an engineering point of view to change a cow into a whale? If the same question were raised with respect to a car, and you asked what it would take to turn a car into a submarine, we would understand immediately that it would be a massive project of redesign. Virtually every feature of the cow must be changed and adapted, and many of these features must be altered in simultaneous coordination.
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Darwinists continually complain that objections to the blind-watchmaker thesis are based on religious fundamentalism, but examples like this give the lie to such presumptions. Even given all of Allen MacNeill’s stochastic sources of variation, the transformation of a land-dwelling mammal into a whale by such means should stretch credulity beyond the breaking point for any rational person.