And just as easily have a horizontal one as opposed to a vertical one. And if they evolved from land mammals then they de-evolved - since all life supposedly started in the ocean.
Why do you keep repeating such nonsense?
I'm 110% sure plenty of people here have already informed you that evolution is not a ladder, that there is no such thing as a direction upward making some "more evolved" then others.
Yet, here you are... talking about "de-evolution" because life evolved from sea to land and then back to sea.
You make no sense and if I didn't know any better, I would have to call you a liar and dishonest person.
But, I think you genuinly simply don't remember all this criticism or simply assume (for some reason) everybody is wrong and only you are correct.
In any case, just to repeat: evolution is not a ladder. There's no such thing as "more evolved" or "less evolved" or "de-evolved". There is only change over time.
Except flippers evolved long before limbs did - since sea life with flippers existed long before land animals.
Those flippers do not contain all the bones we find in mammal limbs.
If whales evolved from land animals, we would expect at the very least remnants - even if only during embryonic stage. And we do. In the embryo's as well as in adult whales.
So you want flippers to now evolve from limbs, instead of limbs evolving from flippers? I think you have that slightly backwards according to your own theory that life first arose in the seas, then slowly evolved limbs and climbed onto the land.
Maybe you should compare the skeleton of a shark, a whale, a cow and a primate. Especially the bones in the limbs/flippers.
And here, again, we have you misrepresenting evolution once more....
Whales are land creatures that returned to the sea and adapted accordingly. Nothing in evolution says that this couldn't happen. So I wonder what you are talking about...
So the fact that whales have flippers is a point against any belief they came from anywhere other than the ocean.
Again: look at the bones in the "flippers". Compare them with what's inside a regular fish's "flippers". Then come back and try to pretend that "whale flippers" are more alike to "fish flippers" then they are the mammal limbs.
Under evolutionary theory limbs developed from flippers - not flippers from limbs. At least get the sequence correct if you are going to propose something.
Please learn what the theory
actually says and stop trying to draw your own conclusions... GIGO - ever heared from it? "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
When you start with a misconception of what evolution is, you're not going to draw correct conclusions.