A Creationist Fable

In August 1989, the Christchurch Press published two articles from The Economist which were highly critical of "scientific" creationists and their "discipline". The articles sparked a correspondence under the heading "Evolution", which attained Guinness Record proportions — 118 letters, involving 52 correspondents over 86 days.

A persistent creationist, D. H. Karst, cited "bears changing into whales (Nov 28) as an example of an idea he intimated had become part of evolutionary explanation. My initial reaction (Dec 5) was that Karst had found it necessary to resort to ridicule and nonsense. No evolutionist, to my knowledge, has ever suggested that whales have evolved from bears. (The fossil evidence suggests the former arrived some 20 million years before the latter.)

Karst retaliated (Dec 8) with the statement that I was attacking Darwin himself, and proceeded to inform us that "Darwin cites the case of a North American black bear observed swimming with open mouth catching insects in the water". He then quoted directly from Origin: "...1 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".

A careful reading of Origin indicates that Darwin's main reason for referring to the black bear was to illustrate a peculiar habit which has the potential to provide natural selection with the opportunity to start a new line with a markedly different mode of life. Nowhere does Darwin suggest that bears did in fact give rise to whales.

Karst claimed that Darwin "was forced to delete" the bear scenario from later editions "but that correspondence with colleagues later in life shows he still firmly believed in the bear-whale case". I sought out Darwin's correspondence on this matter.

In an August 1860 letter to a critic of natural selection, Darwin writes:

“You object to all my examples. They are all necessarily conjectural, and may be false; but they were the best I could give. The bear case has been well laughed at, and disingenuously distorted by some into my saying a bear could be converted into a whale. As it offended persons, I struck it out in the second edition; but ! still maintain that there is no especial difficulty in a bear's mouth being enlarged to any degree useful to its changing habits."

In 1861, Darwin thanked a supported for being "so heroically bold" as to defend his bear illustration. "It is laughable how often I have been attacked and misrepresented about this bear."

Twenty years later, Darwin pointed out that the example dealing with the black bear was "omitted in subsequent editions, owing to the advice of Prof. Owen, as it was liable to be misinterpreted; but have always regretted that followed this advice, for I still think the view quite reasonable".

It is clear Darwin was only too well aware of the misinterpretations placed on his black bear scenario and, interestingly, encountered a level of ignorance and obstinacy which is still endemic among antievolutionists today. The attitude is no better illustrated than in the 1989 Press correspondence on evolution.