Scientists Discover Another Suspicious Missing Link

The discovery was helped along by CT scans of several fish fossils, conducted in the hopes of filling a “longstanding gap in the flatfish fossil record.” Flatfishes are strange-looking fish that have both eyes on the same side of their body, as in the case of flounder.

Flatfishes are strange-looking fish that have both eyes on the same side of their body.

National Geographic News writes, “The discovery of a missing link in the evolution of bizarre flatfishes . . . could give intelligent design advocates a sinking feeling.” So what’s the scoop? Evolutionists have long wondered how “modern” lopsided flatfishes could have come about from primitive flatfish; the article describes it as a “mystery” and evolutionary biologist Richard Palmer of the University of Alberta described it as having been “a major, major puzzle.” But according to the new study, the CT-scanned fish fossils show bone structures that look normal on one side of the skull but with a moved-up eye on the other.

This arrangement is thus considered an intermediate step between the so-called primitive and modern flatfishes. “Once you get that extra degree of movement, having a slightly shifted eye is going to be a lot better than having no shifted eye at all,” explained study author Matt Friedman, a paleontologist with the University of Chicago and the Field Museum.

National Geographic News interviewed zoologist Frank Sherwin of the Institute for Creation Research, an organization devoted to biblical, young-earth creation. We share Sherwin’s perspective:

Zoologist Frank Sherwin, science editor for the Institute for Creation Research, called the findings “underwhelming.”

Zoologist Frank Sherwin, science editor for the Institute for Creation Research, called the findings “underwhelming.”

“We do not deny that there is minor variation that occurs within created groups or kinds,” he said, adding that he fails to see the new paper as evidence of a progression from one flatfish form to another.

“Fish have always been fish, all the way down to the lower Cambrian,” he added.

“We have no problem with the variation within flatfish. What we’re asking is, Show me how a fish came from a nonfish ancestor.”

Whether these flatfish are a variation within their kind or are instead a unique variation of flatfish created on Day 5 of Creation Week, we can clearly explain their origin through the biblical model of creation. Also notable (as we’ve pointed out before) is that such major gaps in evolutionists’ story of the fossil record rarely come to light until they are thought to be filled.

But most humorous is that evolutionists seem to think the shifting eyes of a few fish fossils can shift our eyes from intelligent design toward the tale that all the complexities of life evolved through accidental mutations over millions of years.