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A fish in the rocks is worth dozens in the pan
As reported in "Fits or favors? One-eyed over flatfish", evolutiondom is asizzle with excitement over fossil fish found to have an arrangement of eyes and shape of skull "half way" between that of normal, symmetrical fish and of flatfish, such as flounder, which have both eyes on the same side of their distorted, asymmetrical skull. The discovery has supposedly embarrassed creationists, some of whose number have argued that a gradual, step-by-step change from the normal condition to the flatfish condition just could never have happened; what possible survival advantage could intermediate forms enjoy such that each small change would be retained by natural selection? Creationists are now meant to kowtow to the new evidence of gradual development from "straight" fish to flatfish and abandon all belief in intelligent design. Janvier declares that the discovery, "will help lay to rest a favored creationist example".1 No way!
Truth is, evolutionists themselves are divided over the absolutely fundamental question of how many steps are required to get from A to B, from salamander to frog (or is it the other way round?) or from normal fish to flatfish. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands, or what? Gradualists, who believe in at least "lots" of transitional forms, are opposed by "saltationists" who adhere to belief in big, single jumps - from, say, normal fish to flatfish in one leap. Saltationists believe that occasionally a genetic transformation occurs that produces a "monster"; if only one monster in a thousand just happens to be well-equipped for survival, that's all you need. (Of course, they never stop to contemplate that you would need two genetically-compatible pseudo-monsters - one boy and one girl - at exactly the same time in exactly the same place. But let's be charitable and not point out this insuperable problem.)
One of the most notable saltationists is the late Stephen Jay Gould. Gould has angered many other evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins, because his leapfrog theories shake the entire Darwinian edifice so strongly it is in danger of collapse. After noting that "we have no direct evidence for smooth transitions", Gould adds,
But the weight of these, and many similar cases, wore down my faith in gradualism long ago.2
Gould is far from alone in abandoning gradualism. In short, evolutiondom is riven with internal dissent. Those evolutionists who believe that evolution has proceeded as a result of the gradual accumulation of numerous tiny changes over extended time have breathed a sigh of relief over the new fossil fish discoveries. Until now, the fossil record showed only the existence of, first, normal fish and, second, fully-distorted fish, with no intermediate stages. The discovery in old museum collections of a couple of alleged transitional forms (Heteronectes and Amphistium) has supposedly proven that the gradualists are right. One cannot help but wonder if the numerous articles that fling the new finds in the teeth of creationists are contrived to deflect attention from the real dispute within evolutiondom itself.
Back to Heteronectes and Amphistium.
First, the discovery of two intermediate forms is nowhere near enough to prove gradual transformation. What evolutionists don't want us to know is that,
. direct evidence for evolution only resides in the existence of unambiguous sequential arrangements.3
For gradualism to have any hope of winning the day, its proponents need to find at least dozens of transitional forms between normal symmetrical fish and the innovative flatfish form. They haven't. No, evolutionists cannot appeal to the paucity of the fossil record on this point. Numerous specimens of Heteronectes and Amphistium have been found in the spectacular fifty-million-years-old Monte Bolca deposits of Italy. These deposits are "outstanding in terms of the number and quality of the specimens".4
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The deposits have yielded over 247 species of fish from 82 families of coral reef fish. The sediments were not dumped in a few days but over the course of probably millions of years. If other transitional forms occurred (as must be the case if gradualism is true) they would have been found! More fossil specimens of these two forms have been found in Lutetian deposits from hundreds of miles away in France laid down probably a few million years later.5 In other words, the extensiveness of both the Italian and French deposits makes it very likely that Heteronectes and Amphistium are the only two allegedly transitional forms that ever existed.
Second, contra the rhetoric in the popular, pro-evolution press, neither of these fish is regarded by the author of the much-quoted article as even being in the direct lineage of modern flatfish! He says,
. this distribution of characters indicates that Amphistium and Heteronectes branch from pleuronectiform [flatfish] stem, outside the crown clade that contains living forms plus all other known fossil examples.6
Translated: they aren't ancestors at all! You won't find any propaganda pieces quoting this sentence.
Third, as with creationists, evolutionists can be a pretty slippery lot, picking and choosing evidence - and interpreting it - according to a yardstick of convenience. To illustrate, note Friedman's assertion that displaced eyes are "an unambiguous synapomorphy of that clade" (p. 209). That is, no other interpretation is allowable than that displaced eyes in numerous species must be a shared inherited characteristic of all the species. Contrast this insistence on shared inheritance with the shocking frequency with which evolutionists call on "convergent evolution" to account for remarkable similarities of structure found in creatures that they do not believe are closely related. In these cases, virtually identical features are said to have evolved totally independently! (See "What went on and on in the Gogo long, long ago?") Why could not Heteronectes have evolved asymmetry independently of other flatfish?
Fourth, the condition of the alleged transitionals can be legitimately interpreted in a completely different way than as representing the earliest innovations in a trend towards asymmetry from the normal condition. Evolutionists often talk about loss of characters and even of reversal of evolutionary direction. In such cases, the genome mutates "backwards" (and why not, since mutations are supposedly random). Because of this distinct possibility (by evolution theory), Heteronectes cannot be confidently considered an intermediate step in the "right" direction. It may be a regression. Now if it appeared in the fossil record before full-blown flatfish, well, that fact could be taken to support the assertion of its primitiveness. But.
Fifth, as Friedman says, Heteronectes and friend, "are contemporaries of the earliest members of many derived pleuronectiform [flatfish] lineages, including the oldest known sole" (p. 212). He speaks of "the sudden appearance of anatomically modern pleuronectiform groups in the Palaeogene period". Translate: Heteronectes and its modern day "sisters" all appeared in the fossil record at the same time. Janvier tries valiantly to fob off any attacks against this obvious Achilles heel in the evolutionary scenario by recourse to the old excuse - missing evidence:
These fossil fishes are coeval with the earliest, typically asymmetrical fossil soles, and must have had an earlier and rather long unrecorded history, during which they survived perfectly well despite their squinting eyes.7
Earlier Heteronectes just didn't enter the fossil record because of bad luck. Convenient, very convenient
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1Squint of the fossil flatfish, Nature, 454: 169-170, p. 169
2The Return of Hopeful Monsters
3Denton, Michael 1985, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 131
4Bellwood, D. R. 1996, The Eocene fishes of Monte Bolca: the earliest coral reef fish assemblage, Coral Reefs, 15:11-19
5Friedman, Matt 2008, The evolutionary origin of flatfish asymmetry, Nature, 454:209-212, p. 209
6Friedman, p. 210
7Janvier, p. 169
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