Can you explain this to me?

[-Soul in this universe-]

Evolution states that even huge whales are ultimately descended from fish-like animals that came from microbes. I can understand a msall animal and a large animal producing a baby larger than both aprents, but how can the first animal hatched or born the size of a newborn whale have come from smaller animals wtih microbe ancestry? I don't see how even natural selection AND "Billions of years of slow transitioning" can explain that to me at the present time..

[lambdanaut]

It's like this:

An animal this size: - and an animal this size: -
Had a baby this size: --
And one day an animal of that size: -- and an animal of this size: --
Had a baby this size: ---
And then it happened that an animal this size: --- and an animal this size: ---
Had a baby this size: ----

etc
etc
etc


and then one day an animal this size: -----------------------------------------
and an animal this size: -----------------------------------------
had a baby this size: ------------------------------------------

And people, with their pathology for naming ALL things, decided that at that point the baby looked enough like something that they'd call a "WHALE", to call it a "WHALE".

And that is where little whales come from, any questions?

[Layra-chan]

The point is that babies aren't just a combination of their parents. It is possible for two creatures to have a child that is larger or smaller than either of them through mutation. Probably not much larger or smaller than them, but not necessarily the exact average. And then selection takes over.

Suppose you have 2 pairs of creatures, each of size 6. So our population looks like {6, 6, 6, 6}.
And each pair has four children. Some of the children are smaller, say, size 5, while others are larger, say, size 7. So our sample of kids is {5, 5, 5, 5, 7, 7, 7, 7}.
Now suppose all the small kids die. So we're left with {7, 7, 7, 7} as our population. Now all of our creatures are larger!
And now our population has kids. Since the parents are larger, the new batch of kids will be larger on average; some will be size 6 and some will be of size 8, so we get {6, 6, 6, 6, 8, 8, 8, 8}.
And then the small kids die, leaving us with {8, 8, 8, 8}. And again, our creatures are larger than their parents were.

[Desdamin]

...obviously you do not know how babies are made...

[Vannak]

Well if we're talking about the microbial jump to multi cellular organism, it goes like this.

First we have single cells. They operate together to do things, but don't have form or function. Bacteria in a petri dish will be able to "communicate" with chemical signals.

But then they start to form together. Coral for instance. First we get things with two types of cells: inside and outside. The outside cells are totally devoted to absorbing food and releasing waste. The inner cells distribute food.

From here it's not that hard to see how some inner cells can develop proto-organs, and outter cells might specialize to form sensory organs.

One should note that all of this multicellular evolution happened way before anything "gave birth" or laid an egg.

[Shokushu]

Well if you don't have any problem seeing how a baby can end up a bit bigger than both parents it sounds like the part you don't understand would be mutation or general development systems.

Long scale mutation is hard to wrap your mind around but ultimately it can really make any and every change (so long as it's a point mutation, deletion, duplication, or inversion- but never mind that.)

As for development the shapes we become are all about cell division. If you slow it down in one place then you get an indent and if you speed it up or do an extra round it will jut out- put simply. Aside from that once you get up to about the size of a worm you have hormones doing a lot of the work of telling the body how to grow so cells that divide a whole lot plus hormones also telling them to go fast can obviously make them pretty big.