“Actually, I’m more interested in intra-species communication, especially among orca. Last week while we were training, Ben and I witnessed a pod of orca attack and kill two minke whales. The coordination of the hunt was incredibly efficient.

“But now let me ask you something, Susan. As a cetacean expert, do you accept Darwin’s theory that whales used to be land mammals? I believe in the first edition of his Origin of Species he claims the ancestors of whales were a race of bears, though the accepted natural-selection species is now a wolf-like carnivore called a Mesonyx.”

“Honestly, Dr. Wallace, I’ve always disagreed with Darwin on this one. The first whales appeared about fifty million years ago. By most accounts there would have been tens of thousands if not millions of whales in the sea. That adds up to a mass exodus of a land species to a radically different environment. What would have caused it? And how do Darwin’s theories regarding natural selection account for the incredible adaptations and mutations needed to change a relatively small land animal into a fifty- to one-hundred-ton leviathan able to swim deep in the ocean? The skeletal and physiological changes alone are collectively beyond reason, and yet we’re expected to believe these evolutionary changes happened in only five to ten million years? Ridiculous.”

“For the record, Susan, I agree. But I’d still like to hear your explanation.”

“It’s simple really. The ancestors of modern whales were prehistoric fish. Take Leedsichthys. Here was an eighty-foot prehistoric gill-breather with massive pectoral fins. Subtract the gills and add lungs and a blowhole and you have a humpback whale. Whale sharks siphon krill in a similar manner to baleen whales; orcas possess jaws similar to most sharks. Other than the manner in which the species breathe, the differences are subtle. Yes, the tail movements are different, but the horizontal movements of a fluke are an adaptation conducive to breathing above the surface. Which is easier to accept: that a Leeds fish could lose its gills and evolve a blowhole and lungs or that a four-legged wolf-like creature could shed its fur, alter its entire physiology, and increase its size a hundred fold to become a whale?”

“Point taken. But why would a fish become an air-breather in the first place?”

“Adaptations are necessitated by changes in diet and environment. I just think it’s easier to accept an aquatic animal evolving an alternative means of processing oxygen and carbon dioxide than a wolf or bear entering the sea, losing its fur, limbs, and pelvis and growing a fluke.”