Wednesday 2 September 2009

Polar bears are shrinking – but the media does not associate this with evolution



Image courtesy of Ansgar Walk, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Last week BBC News reported that polar bears are shrinking but it did not associate this with Darwinian evolution.

In a recent study, Cino Pertoldi, a biology professor at the University of Aarhus, and colleagues measured the skulls of 300 polar bears. They noticed that the skulls from the latter part of the 20th century were on average 2 - 9 per cent smaller than those from the early part. The researchers assume that this is due to a reduction in sea ice and an increase in pollutants such as fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine.

Darwinists often describe evolution as change before switching their definition in mid-sentence. Recently, when Time magazine reported on the shrinking sheep of Scotland, it reminded readers of the contribution of Darwinian evolution.

The absence of the usual evolution connection is surprising. Could the recent buzz over the Ida fossil have dampened the Darwinian zeal to interpret all change as evolution?

However, Pertoldi and colleagues do remind us of man-made global warming that has become a dogma that is promoted as vigorously as Darwinian evolution.


Source:


Gill, Victoria. 2009. 'Stress' is shrinking polar bears. BBC News (25 August) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/science/nature/8214673.stm