DARWIN WROTE IN THE FIRST EDITION OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES that North American black bears had been seen "swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water." What did this have to do with the subject of his book? "Even in so extreme a case as this," Darwin continued, "if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."
Critics poked fun at this, and Darwin removed it from later editions, but he defended it privately. "The bear case has been well laughed at, and disingenuously distorted by some into my saying that a bear could be converted into a whale," he wrote in an 1860 letter. "As it offended persons, I struck it out in the second edition; but I still maintain that there is no especial difficulty in a bear's mouth being enlarged to any degree useful to its changing habits, — no more difficulty than man has found in increasing the crop of the pigeon, by continued selection, until it is literally as big as the whole rest of the body.”
So wrote Jonathon Wells in his book Zombie Science. But Darwin’s Theory of Evolution had problems. Problems that he knew and worried about from day one and they were as big as a whale. In fact the first and biggest , most threatening problem to his Theory of Evolution that he knew about was as big as a Blue Whale – or a 200 ton aquatic American black bear.
Tag words: Charles Darwin; On the Origin of Species; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; Stephen Meyer; Return of the God Hypothesis; Neo-Darwinism; the modern synthesis; Richard Dawkins; The God Delusion; Bishop Samuel Wilberforce; Thomas Henry Huxley; Daniel Boorstin; The Discoverers; Alister McGrath; The Twilight of Atheism; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker;
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