Fairy Tales of Fred Williams

Fred Williams' creationist site shows a number of fairy tales supposedly debunking evolution. All are fatally flawed.

• A wolf is shown walking into water and drowning, thereby "proving" that whales must have been created.
  • Single animals do not evolve! Think POPULATIONS!
  • There would have to be MANY intermediate steps!
  • The most recent hypothesis is that whales came from ... the ancestors of hippos! Makes sense, enh? This is MOLECULAR DATA. (Felipe (pjohns@email.vill.ed) noted the nice series hippos, otters, sea lions, walruses, seals, manatees, which of course is not an evolutionary progression but shows that there are lots of potential gradations.)

    The reference is Science 1998 August 7; 281: 774-775. (in News Focus) "Judged by its DNA, a whale is just an overgrown hippopotamus with an unusual lifestyle." This is still controversial, but however this one turns out, the point is to let the data speak. Within a few years we will have the complete genomes of organisms and their relationships will become quite clear, as is now happening for the bacterial genomes.
    Further reading:

    • Science News vol 156 Nov 6, 1999, p. 296-298. Unfortunately only the references are available, not the entire article.
      
    • "In search of the whales' sisters", Nature volume 404 16 March 2000, pages 235-237.
  
• A squirrel in a tree is shown jumping after a fly and falling to it's death as proof that flight could not occur. Perhaps the author has never seen flying squirrels? They glide beautifully from one tree to the next! A likely path is easy to construct:
  • Ability to climb trees (grasping claws)
  • hopping from branch to branch
  • Yes! Some fall to the ground and die!!
  • The ones that happen to have a little extra skin under their arms survive more often
  • hops become leaps
  • leaps become glides
  • leaps become controlled glides
  • glides become powered
  Voila! A bat! In response to someone's comment that he is "denying the existence of flying squirrels" Williams claims that "It appears you hold to the Lamarkian view that flying squirrels obtained their ability to fly via acquired characteristics." This claim is not relevant. Steps like the ones given above occur in large populations. There is no Lamarkian effect here. Variation in the direction indicated leads to animals to survive and produce more progeny.
  Note: I do not mean that bats evolved from squirrels, I simply use that as an example of a reasonable route that evolution could have taken to achieve flight, starting from a tree climber.

Jeremy Vecoli (stjerome@uswest.net) [note: this link is dead as of 2001 Dec 23] keeps flying squirrels; the pictures above are posted here with his permission. He points out that "there is a marsupial called a sugar glider that independently evolved the same gliding ability as the flying squirrel. They are starting to be popular as pets in the US. The sugar glider is from New Zealand [sic] and it looks very similar to a flying squirrel."

There are many web sites devoted to Sugar Gliders.

2001 Dec 23: correction: Sugar gliders come from Australia. (Thanks to John Calvert, "The intelligent one, not the 'Intelligent Design' one" for pointing this out!)

2005 Apr 22: Apr 10 2005, 05:35 PM Fred Williams manages to repeatedly misspell my name and then labels me an evolutionist and a Marxist. These are all errors (among others), but thanks for the kind words.

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