Amazing! Walking fish evolved 33 times, according to reports in Science (AAAS) News 16 June 2016 and Evolution doi:10.1111/evo.12971 published online 7 June 2016. Many fish that live in shallow waters or near the edge of the sea, such as the mudskippers, are capable of moving out of the water and surviving a wet land surface for periods ranging from 20 minutes to a couple of days. This amphibious behaviour enables to them to survive when pools are drying up or the tide is going out, or move from one pool to another across wet ground. Some fish actually hunt for food on mudflats and intertidal zones.
Terry Ord and Georgina Cooke at the University of New South Wales, Australia, have surveyed the scientific literature for examples of amphibious fish and found 130 living fish species that survive on land. They then put these into an evolutionary tree for fish and concluded: “Thirty-three families have species reported to be amphibious and these are likely independent evolutionary origins of fish emerging onto land”.
Editorial Comment: This 33 fold claim of separately evolving walking fish is actually a good example of the failure of evolutionary trees. Claims (better called excuses) such as “independent evolutionary origins of fish emerging onto land” are not scientific observations. No-one has observed any non-amphibious fish evolve even once into something like the mudskipper, which can move about on mudflats between pools of water.
Time to be honest here, without observations of even one evolution of such amphibious fish, claims for multiple successes for separate but identical ‘evolutions’ is simply an evolving belief held by totally blind faith. To believe a non-amphibious fish evolved into something like a mudskipper requires fantastic faith, so belief it happened 33 times is not just fantastic – it is fantasy!
This beats the previous record for number of times something evolved – the appendix. (See our report Appendix Evolved 32 Times). It is much more sensible to have faith in the Creator who made the different kinds of amphibious fish as fully functional fish designed for behaviour. (Ref. ichthyology, phylogenetics)
Evidence News vol. 16 No. 12
22 June 2016
Creation Research Australia