Scientists Left Floundering for Explanation of Flat Fish Evolution

Kory Evans of Rice University has to be one of the most honest evolutionary scientists on the planet. After an exhaustive study of the genomes of flounders and sole- flat fish that asymmetrically have two eyes on the same side of their body as adults, he was asked if there was some kind of advantage to this condition. "I'm not gonna lie," Evans said. "I don't really know if there's an advantage. I think they did it because they could."

Old-school scientists would have concocted some evolutionary just-so story to explain why having one eye migrate across to the other side of the head and losing a lot of mobility in a flattening process was driven by survival-of-the-fittest necessity. Presumably Evans is of the new school which has tired of spinning such tales and looking for such unicorns. The "Theory of Evolution" is itself evolving and the new take is something called "Neutral Theory". That is to say, changes are not initially driven by adaptations to the environment. The big ones happen "just because they can" and the adaptive ones are much smaller in scope. Sounds a bit like the old "Hopeful Monster" idea, but let's not go there. 

What he has lost in exchange for being free of the burden of having to generate continuous silly explanations is to basically adopt a framework that needs no "why". "Because it could" is explanation enough in neutral theory. But then if you ask "how could that happen" you simply get a list of the complicated interrelated changes that had to occur in tandem to keep a functioning organism. They happened in tandem because they were linked. 

Well, OK, but why is that the case in this group and them alone? Other flatfish didn't flatten that way, as the article points out. And this group radiated radically within a three-million year span and then essentially stopped. That pales in comparison to the vast amount of change in a short time-frame from the densest part of the Cambrian, but it is still a lot of change in a very short time period compared to the sort of background change that seems the "norm". Even a nominally curious mind moves to the question of what powered this unusual process. Too bad. That was what the "selective adaptation" version of evolutionary theory was for, and they don't do that so much now. The Neutral Theory guys don't get drawn into such obligations. You don't need to know "why". "Because it could" is the new Neutral Theory answer.

Creationism/Intelligent Design has an answer to these questions, even if the answer is not testable scientifically. The Creator put new information into His creation, His hand, His mind, made links that nature could never make in the amount of time required to make it work and work well. 

Perhaps someday Neutral Theory Evolutionists will see that there is nothing conceptually in what they are saying that rules out Creationism or Intelligent Design as an explanation for the evolutionary (yes these changes could be BOTH creation and evolution) changes that they see. Maybe those ideas can't be formally tested in their field, but when they are down to saying "because it could" as an explanation for phenomena, then that doesn't matter so much. Evolution and creationism are not stepping on each other anymore under Neutral Theory because NT doesn't ascribe to nature all power to shape life through the environment and survival of the fittest. Nature is "neutral" in that process, as the name implies. Once they say in effect that in the natural realm there is no "why", then the door is open for theology to provide the "why" without stepping on the toes of science. 

Now I wrote "maybe someday NT evolutionists" will see that there is no conceptual conflict with creationism at that point, but that cuts both ways. Creationists should also grow to the place where they see that this sort of "evolution" is also not a threat to their philosophy of nature. 

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