This rant by Alan Haywood, and similar silly statements by his creationist colleagues, reveals a deep mistrust of the scientific description of life’s emergence and evolution. But he is correct in one sense. Science is a slave to rigorous logic and inexorable continuity of argument. If life has changed over time, evolving from a single common ancestor to today’s biological diversity, then many specific predictions about intermediate life-forms must follow. For example, transitional forms between land mammals and whales must have existed sometime in the past. According to the creationists in the mid-1980s, the lack of such distinctive forms stood as an embarrassing, indeed glaring, proof of evolution’s failure. Their conclusion: God, not Darwinian evolution, must have bridged the gap between land and marine animals. But what appeared to them as an embarrassment for science then, has since underscored the power of the scientific method.

Science differs from other ways of knowing because scientific reasoning leads to unambiguous, testable predictions. As Haywood so presciently predicted, whales with atrophied hind legs must have once swum in the seas. If Darwin is correct, then

somewhere their fossils must lie buried. Furthermore, those strange creatures must have arisen during a relatively narrow interval of geological time, bounded by the era before the earliest known marine mammals (about 60 million years ago) and the appearance of streamlined whales of the present era (which appear in the fossil record during the past 30 million years). Armed with these predictions, several paleontologists plotted expeditions into the field and targeted their search on shallow marine formations from the crucial gap between 35 and 55 million years ago for new evidence in the fossil record. Sure enough, in the past decade paleontologists have excavated more than a dozen of these “missing links” in the development of the whale—curious creatures that sport combinations of anatomical features characteristic to both land and sea mammals.

Moving back in time, one such intermediate form is the 35-million-year-old Basilosaurus—a sleek, powerful, toothed whale. This creature has been known for more than a century, but a recent discovery of an unusually complete specimen in Egypt for the first time included tiny, delicate vestigial hind leg bones. That’s a feature without obvious function in the whale, but such atrophied legs provide a direct link to four-limbed ancestral land mammals.

And then a more primitive whale, Rodhocetus, discovered in 1994 in Pakistani sediments about 46 million years old, has more exaggerated hind legs, not unlike those of a seal. And in that same year paleontologists reported the new genus Ambulocetus, the “walking whale.” This awkwardly beautiful 52-million-year-old creature represents a true intermediate between land and sea mammals.

Nor does the story end there. In September 2001, the cover stories of both prestigious weekly magazines Science and Nature trumpeted the discovery of a new proto-whale species that had just been reported from rocks about 50 million years old. Nature’s cover story, titled “When whales walked the earth,” underscores the power of science and the futility of the creationists’ task. Science makes specific, testable predictions. Anyone can go out into the natural world and test those predictions. The creationists were wrong.

Today’s creationists have toted out a new version of this old

“God-in-the-gaps” argument under the fancy name “intelligent design.” Their argument goes like this. Life is so incredibly complex and intricate that it must have been engineered by a higher being. No random natural process could possibly lead from nonlife to even the simplest cell, much less humans. The promoters, notably Michael Behe and William Dembski, don’t talk about “God,” but they leave open the question of who designed the designers.

Such an argument is fatally flawed. For one thing, intelligent design ignores the power of emergence to transform natural systems without conscious intervention. We observe emergent complexity arising all around us, all the time. True, we don’t yet know all the details of life’s genesis story, but why resort to an unknowable alien intelligence when natural laws appear to be sufficient?

I also see a deeper problem with intelligent design, which I believe trivializes God. Why do we have to invoke God every time we don’t have a complete scientific explanation? I am unpersuaded by a God who must be called upon to fill in the gaps of our ignorance—between a cow and a whale, for example. The problem with this view is that as we learn more, the gaps narrow. As paleontologists continue to unearth new intermediate transitional forms, God’s role is squeezed down to ever more trivial variations and inconsequential modifications.

Isn’t it more satisfying to believe in a God who created the whole shebang from the outset—a God of natural laws who stepped back and doesn’t meddle in our affairs? In the beginning God set the entire magnificent fabric of the universe into motion. Atoms and stars and cells and consciousness emerged inexorably, as did the intellect to discover laws of nature through a natural process of self-awareness and discovery. In such a universe, scientific study provides a glimpse of creator as well as creation.