Thursday 20 March 2014

New Darwinian Fable: How the Fish Got Its Fins

Fish fins are the stars of a new Darwinian story.



Joel Kontinen


Evolution would probably be very boring without Darwinian just so stories that like folktales attempt to explain everything we see around us.

A research highlights item in the journal Nature states:

The adipose fin, which sits between the dorsal fin and the tail on many fishes, might have evolved separately in different fish lineages rather than once from a single ancestor. This suggests that the fin … has an adaptive purpose and can evolve into various forms, contrary to previous thinking.”

This conclusion is based on a reconstruction of “the evolutionary relationships of 232 fishes, looking at the presence or absence of adipose fins,” and it relies heavily on Darwinian assumptions.

According to similar logic, the eye must have evolved independently 40 times.

Worldviews seem to play a major role in these assumptions that tend to be relatively free of fact and full of fiction.

Source:

How the fish got its fins. Nature 507 (7491), 142. (13 March 2014).