Something About Whales, Whale Teeth, Evolution, And Creationism

Dorudon atrox, an ancestral whale from the Late Eocene of Egypt, pencil drawing, digital coloring

I came across this article about some recent research that’s been done on how modern toothless (blue whales, humpback whales) evolved from toothed whales somewhere between 5 million and 25 million years ago.

According to the web sheet:

This study focused on one gene, the enamelin gene, which expresses the enamelin protein. Mammals that do not express this protein, such as toothless whales, lack enamel on their teeth (if they have teeth at all), the hardest substance in the vertebrate body, which caps each individual tooth. Evolution predicts that in order to have evolved from toothed ancestors like the fossil record suggests, modern toothless whales must contain a copy of this gene in their genome, yet it will be inactive due to the slow build-up of detrimental mutations over time – ie. it will be a pseudogene.

And according to the leaders of the study – bingo!:

In our research we clearly see the parallel evolution of enamel loss in the fossil record and the molecular decay of the enamelin gene into a pseudogene in representatives of four different orders of mammals that have lost enamel.

Seems pretty straightforward stuff, unless you’re heavily vested in arguing evolution against creationism.
More from the web sheet:

Remember, if evolution did not occur to produce the diversity of life that we see today, and life was created by an intelligent designer, vestigial genes such as the enamelin gene in toothless whales should not exist in any genome. Intelligent design proponents and creationists like to skirt around the issue and claim that some or most pseudogenes are actually functional, but this is untrue. Even if some pseudogenes have gained a function, it still does not discount them as being vestigial remains from early generations.

I’ve got to admit that I’ve never before really been exposed to this level of detail when it comes to this particular debate. It seems, to me, completely ridiculous that these two camps would bother to deconstruct the beliefs of the other, to go back and forth, etc. trying to prove each other wrong. I always wonder if there are any creationists who argue that God is so powerful he could have created a 15 billion year old universe 5 thousand years ago…but, see, that’s how they get you.