Climate and science

Joel Kontinen

How did we know that carbon dioxide levels leading to climate change  had happened over two million years ago? This is based on models and not scientific research.

And then it came with the research that says the following stage was it was around 580 million years ago, during the early Paleozoic era.

“This drop in temperature occurred in concert with a decline in clay authigenesis and the rise of siliceous life.”

This is what Darwinian storytelling tells us.

 

Source:

H. Jesse Smith. 2024. In Science Journals | Science 9 February. 

Tigers' stripes

 

Image courtecy of Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0

Joel Kontinen

How did the tiger get its stripes? According to the British nobelist Rudyard Kipling who stated  in 1902 collection Just So Stories for Little Children. The tales were light-hearted explanations of how animals got a certain trait, as the names of the stories indicate, for instance How the Leopard got His Spots or How the Camel got his Hump..

According to Live Science, “Tiger stripes vary between individuals, much like fingerprints in humans. The markings play an important role in helping a tiger remain hidden while hunting prey. The stripes help break up the blend in with tall grass.”

It goes on the say, “in 1952, the British Mathematician Alan Turing theorized that a chemical reaction between two homogeneous substances were responsible for the famous tiger-stripe pattern, along with other patterns commonly found in nature. He dubbed these substances "morphogens." One acted as an "activator" and the other as an "inhibitor" — with the "activator" causing a stripe to form and the "inhibitor" creating a blank space.

And, “In 2012, a study in the journal Nature Genetics experimentally validated this theory by identifying the morphogens at play in the formation of ridge patterns in the mouths of mice.”

This is according to Darwinian storytelling, with no strings attached to the truth. 

Source:

Elise Poore 2024. How 10 animals evolved their iconic features | Live Science  6 January.

 

Milk Drinking by Fossils

Johannes Vermeer: The Milkmaid, public domain.



Joel Kontinen

Science reports the following:

“One trait that is unique to mammals is milk suckling. Suckling requires the presence of stability and motion in the throat, both of which require a complex hyoid apparatus. Zhou et al. describe a mammaliform docodontan fossil from the Jurassic that was preserved with a nearly intact hyoid.”

The abstract of the reports says this:

“ We report a new Jurassic docodontan mammaliaform found in China that is preserved with the hyoid bones. Its basihyal, ceratohyal, epihyal, and thyrohyal bones have mobile joints and are arranged in a saddle-shaped configuration, as in the mobile linkage of the hyoid apparatus of extant mammals.”

It is different from cynodonts, that are not mammals, so according to evolutionists it must have been surprise, leading to mammal’s ancestors.

This is just a Darwinian story, devoid of all true evidence.

Source:

Zhou, Chang-Fu et. al 2019. New Jurassic mammaliaform sheds light on early evolution of mammal-like hyoid bones. Science 365, 6450, 276-279. (19 July).

Panspermia Can’t Solve the Origin of Life Hypothesis

Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

“Samples of a particular group of primitive meteorites — including a large one that fell near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 — all contain cyanide, bound in a stable configuration with iron and carbon monoxide. These same sorts of structures are found in enzymes called hydrogenases in modern bacteria and archaea, which could suggest that early life either borrowed from meteorites or that early Earth's geology formed the same kind of cyanide compounds, said study co-author Michael Callahan, an analytical chemist Boise State University.”

“The cyanide seems to have survived billions of years in space and a fiery trip to rest in icy Antarctica because it was bound up in a stable configuration with carbon monoxide and iron. ‘It's this really classical inorganic chemistry,’ Callahan said.”

“Callahan and his colleagues reported their work June 25 in the journal Nature Communications.

Naturalistic origin of life research has always been a more or less messy affair. The problem with their origin of life scenes is always the same: they don’t work.

This is can’t have happened here so they think it might have happened somewhere else. but introducing a comet in 1969. This is clearly panspermia, or the view that life evolved from somewhere else.

The problem with this is the thing that somewhere life has to be made, just making the the universe do the trick only make matters difficult for researchers, as they have to fathom where it all started.

And we know that the universe is guided by reason and it is intelligently designed. God says it happened here, so why cannot we just believe His words?

Source:

Pappas, Stephanie. 2019. Cyanide-Laced Meteorites May Have Seeded Earth's First Life. Live Science (28 June).

The Platypus of The Seas Is Found

Callichimaera perplexa. Image courtesy of Oksana Vernygora/ University of Alberta.





Joel Kontinen

It’s been called the platypus of the crab world .

The researchers found “It had the mouth of a shrimp, the claws of a modern frog crab, the shell of a lobster and the paddle-like appendages of a sea scorpion.”

Lead researcher Javier Luque, who now work for Yale University and the University of Alberta in Canada, found the first specimen in 2005 in the Colombian Andes Mountains. He thinks that the crab recounts that the "true crabs" lost and reevolved their body plans many times throughout history."

This amount to Darwinian storytelling.

Source:
.
Source: Geggel, Laura. 2019. 'Beautiful Nightmare' Crab Sported Lobster Shell, Shrimp Mouth and Soccer Ball Eyes. Live Science (24 April).

Darwinian Claim: “Chickens Peck Intruder Fox to Death, Because They're Dinosaurs”

Image courtesy of Otto Scheuerer (1862–1934), public domain.



Joel Kontinen

A young fox, probably about 6 mounts old, got into a chicken coop or hen house at a farm school in Brittany, in northwestern France.

And that’s when Charles Darwin takes over.

This coop held 3,000 hens. “As soon as the sun set and the light-controlled, automatic hatch door closed behind the fox, the birds channeled their inner Tyrannosaurus rex and attacked the fox.”

Chicks can be fiery. And this time, they attacked to fox, leaving him dead. The last time a fox got into the coop, the chickens were not so successful.

This is how Darwinian just so stories have become mainstream.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2019. Chickens Peck Intruder Fox to Death, Because They're Dinosaurs. Live Science. (13 March).

New Darwinian Story: Waves Could Have Spurned the Evolution of Backbones

Image courtesy of Nobumichi Tamura.




Joel Kontinen

A new Scientist Story says that new Darwinian analysis suggests vertebrate animals evolved in shallow waters.

What does this rely on?

Nothing. It relies on the assumption that backbones “are thought to have begun to diversify around 480 million years ago, splitting into groups that would become jawless fish (like lampreys), cartilaginous fish (including sharks), and a lineage that includes bony fish (such as salmon),” which lead to man.

Now, Lauren Sallan and colleague brought together have 3, 000 early fish fossils.

“We found that all vertebrates, from the first jawless forms to sharks and bony fishes, originated in very restricted shallow waters hugging the coast line,” says Sallan.

He thinks man was evolved in this way.

This is just one of the infamous Darwinian just so-stories.

Source:

Joel, Lucas. 2018. Crashing waves may have spurred the evolution of backbones. New Scientist (25 October).

New Research Attempts to Explain the Evolution of the Human Brain

Image courtesy of Patrick J. Lynch, CC BY 2.5.



Joel Kontinen

Once again, the human brain is making headlines.

Its complexity continues to baffle scientists and it inspires engineers to build smarter computers.

As our big brain is a Darwinian enigma, evolutionists have to try to explain its genesis.

Two papers in the journal Cell report on the discovery of the gene family NOTCH2NL Science Daily explains:

“The genes are found exclusively in humans, are heavily expressed in neural stem cells of the human cerebral cortex, and are located on a part of the genome implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The discovery has inspired some typical Darwinian storytelling.

The researchers suspect that some three million years ago, these genes enabled the human brain to become three times as big as previously. And that is why we have the ability to “think, problem-solve, and develop culture.”

The basic problem in these studies is that they merely discovered what these genes do now. The part on their evolution is wholly superfluous and amounts to storytelling.

Source:

Cell Press. 2018. Meet NOTCH2NL, the human-specific genes that may have given us our big brains. Science Daily. (31 May).

Like to Eat Insects? Thank Our Assumed Ancestors for Your Gourmet Choices

Pangolin, Manis javanica. Image courtesy of Piekfrosch, CC BY-SA 3.0 .




Joel Kontinen

Why do some people like to eat insects? Reporting on a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, Phys.org proposes an answer.

It has to do with our (assumed) ancestors – “small, furry creatures that scurried around the feet of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago” – who were mostly insect eaters.

“The scientists inferred this because the genes for the enzymes that allowed these early ancestors of all mammals to digest insects are still hanging around in nearly all mammal genomes today.”

These enzymes are called chitinases. Scientists think that humans also have a chitinase gene as well as “remnants of three other chitinase genes in their genome, though none of them are functional.”

This does not signify common descent, however.

While the paper never even suggests that there might be a better and more logical explanation than a typical Darwinian just-so story, common design is a far more credible one.

Source:

University of California - Berkeley. 2018. What we inherited from our bug-eating ancestors. Phys.org (16 May).

New Darwinian Tale: US Scientists Engineered a Human-Chimp Hybrid 100 Years Ago

Image courtesy of Delphine Bruyere, CC BY-SA 3.0.





Joel Kontinen


Human exceptionalism is a Darwinian enigma. Thus, evolutionists are willing to see human traits in animals and animal traits in humans.

At times, their strategy borders on the absurd. A case in point is the rumour that US scientists engineered a human-chimp hybrid in the 1920s in the first primate research centre established in the US in Orange Park, Florida.

According to the rumour, a female chimpanzee was supposedly inseminated with human semen and gave birth to a “humanzee”.

The tale is full of holes, as such a hybrid is biologically impossible, and the details in the story are doubtful as well, as the purported research centre was established in the 1930s, not the 1920s.

No wonder, then, that scientists are not convinced; they rend to believe that the rumour is just a rumour.

The Russian biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov also attempted to produce a human-chimp hybrid, but needless to say, he failed.

Humans are created in the image of God, but apes aren’t so trying to hybridize them is doomed to failure.

All successful hybrids belong to the same Genesis kind.



Source:

Dockrill, Peter. 2018. Scientist Claims US Lab Engineered 'Humanzee' Human-Chimp Hybrid 100 Years Ago. Science Alert (31 January).

Lizard “Evolves a Complex Trait It Once Lost”?

Image courtesy of Jörg Hempelage, CC BY-SA 3.0 de.



Joel Kontinen

Most female lizards lay eggs, but the Zootoca vivipara (‘live-bearing’) gives birth to young offspring, expect for two subspecies.

This prompted New Scientist to speculate that this is a “rare example of a species re-evolving a complex trait that had been lost.”

According to this scenario, lizards first laid eggs, then stopped laying it, forgetting the trait, and then re-discovered it.

The problem with this kind of reasoning is that any kind of change can be seen as an example of Darwinian evolution, even when it clearly isn’t.

It is an example of Darwinian storytelling, which often tends to be more or less fact-free.

Source:

Le Page, Michael. 2017.Lizards re-evolved eggs after thousands of years of live births. New Scientist (5 December).

Evolution as Storytelling: Evolutionary Biology Is “A Loose Collection of Narratives That Are Forged to Fit the Evidence — Any Evidence Whatsoever,” German Paleontologist Günter Bechly Says

Do Darwinian stories resemble the tales people tell around campfires? The answer might be yes. Image courtesy of Abc10, CC BY-SA 4.0).





Joel Kontinen

Discussing two recently published fossils (Including the fish Hongyu chowi that I wrote about recently), German paleontologist Günter Bechly laments how Darwinists try to turn all fossils into evidence for their pet theory, even when discoveries challenge it:

“Dubious procedures like these would be unthinkable in other natural sciences, such as physics. They call into question whether evolutionary biology really qualifies as a hard science at all. Arguably it is not a testable theory, or even a well-defined one, but merely a loose collection of narratives that are forged to fit the evidence — any evidence whatsoever.”

Doctor Bechly is not the first to criticise the uncritical approach of Darwinists.

In a famous article published in The Scientist in 2005,
Professor Philip S. Skell, who was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, took on natural selection:

Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive – except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed – except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.”

And many other scientists have admitted that Darwinism doesn’t work.

Source:

Bechly, Günter. 2017. With Two New Fossils, Evolutionists Rewrite Narratives to Accommodate Conflicting Evidence Evolution News & Science Today (13 September).

Fossil Fish Discovery Suggests the Darwinian Water-to-Land Crawl Is Flawed

Latimeria chalumnae is a lobe-finned fish that did not leave the sea.




Joel Kontinen

“The evolutionary story we have written to explain our ancestors’ move from sea to land may need a rethink,” Colin Barras writes in New Scientist.

But then he continues with the very story that he says needs a rethink, or has to be thrown out due to a dire lack of evidence:

“Roughly 360 million years ago, one group of lobe-finned fish began evolving into four-legged, land-living animals that resulted in reptiles, amphibians and mammals like us.”

Perhaps it would be good to remember that the original dino fish or the coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae is a lobe-finned fish that did not leave the sea.

Evolutionists once assumed that it became extinct together with the dinosaurs, but some 200 living specimens have been found. This hardy living fossil has hardly changed in “380 million years”.

A paper recently published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution looks at a lobe-finned fish known as Hongyu chowi. Discovered in China in 2002, the 1.5 metres (5 feet) long creature does not fit into the Darwinian tree of life.

As it has features that it shouldn’t have, researchers had to invoke convergent evolution to hammer it onto the fallen tree.

Convergent evolution is often used in attempts to fix Darwinian dilemmas, but it often serves to make them worse.

Rhizodus, A distant relative, might have looked like this. Image courtesy of DiBgd, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source:

Barras, Colin. 2017. Weird fish fossil changes the story of how we moved onto land New Scientist (4 September).

Squid’s Vision and Other Designed Features Challenge Darwinian Stories

Fossil squid shows lack of evolution. Image courtesy of Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0.



Joel Kontinen

Squid are fascinating creatures. They use jet propulsion to dart through the water and can even fly above the surface over a short distance.

They can hide from predators by changing colour.

These are not the only design features in this animal that can rightfully be called a living fossil. Even its ink has not changed in “150 million years”.

Recently, Science published a paper on how squid can see clearly in water:

“It’s hard to see underwater, and not just because of the chlorine. The image-producing light rays that enter our eyes have trouble bending and focusing when the water’s density is almost same as that of eye fluid. Sea creatures experience the same problem, but squid use a type of lens notorious for blurry images to correct that, researchers report today in Science. Spherical lenses, like the squids’, usually can’t focus the incoming light to one point as it passes through the curved surface, which causes an unclear image. The only way to correct this is by bending each ray of light differently as it falls on each location of the lens’s surface.”

So far, so good. But then they attribute a cleverly designed feature to blind evolution:

“S-crystallin, the main protein in squid lenses, evolved the ability to do this by behaving as patchy colloids—small molecules that have spots of molecular glue that they use to stick together in clusters. The S-crystallins feature a pair of loops that act as the proteins’ sticky patches and attract the loops of other S-crystallins. Globs of six proteins link together during the squid’s larval stage and form a gel that eventually becomes the center of the lens. As the gel becomes too dense with protein clumps, smaller particles struggle to diffuse through, and a new layer of protein packages forms with just under six S-crystallins in each clump. The process continues until the outer edge of the lens is formed with pairs of S-crystallins. This allows light rays to bend a little differently in each region of the lens, which yields a clearer image.”

Invoking evolution is totally unnecessary. A protein does not have the ability to evolve anything.

It is clear that like the intricate trilobite eye, squids also defy Darwinian just so stories about eye evolution.

Source:

Sinclair, Kai. 2017. Watch the secret to a squid’s crystal clear underwater vision. Science (10 August).

Humans May Have an Inbuilt GPS, Research Suggests

Image courtesy of Nachoman-au, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

New research published in the journal Nature Communications suggests that we may have an inbuilt GPS system that enables us to find our way.

Dutch researchers Jeroen Bos, Martin Vinck, Cyriel Pennartz and colleagues have “identified a new type of neuron which might play a vital role in humans' ability to navigate their environments.”

An article in Science Daily gives us the gist of what they found out:

“The ability to make fine grained assessments of location is seated in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure located in the temporal lobe. Research shows that the precise mechanism for navigation includes hippocampal place cells, which increase or decrease in electrical activity depending on one's location. However, when making their daily commute, people don't need very detailed representations of which houses they pass in which order. Instead, they can make due with more course information.”

They made rats navigate their way in a maze and looked at what parts of the brain they mainly used.

Jeroen Bos, the lead author of the paper, thinks they found a new type of neuron, which they dubbed the ‘neighbourhood cell.’

“This neuron seems to enable the brain to specifically differentiate between distinct segments (‘neighbourhoods’) of the environment,” he says.

Our big brain is a Darwinian enigma that keeps on giving surprises to neuroscientists.

Its amazingly complex interactions cannot be explained away by Darwinian just so stories.

Source:

Universiteit van Amsterdam (UVA). 2017. New 'GPS' neuron discovered. Science Daily. (29 May).

Fishy Tail Tale, Courtesy of Live Science

Image courtesy of Terry Howard, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

When the title of a pro-evolution article starts with the words 'Tale of 2 Tails,' we would expect to be treated to an intriguing, yet speculative Darwinian story.

This is what recently happened at Live Science.

Marine creatures, we are told, do not swim in the same way. Whales evolved from mammals that lived on land. They move their tails up and down. Sharks, in contrast, are fish, so they move their tails from side to side.

This is how Kenneth Lacovara, a professor of paleontology and geology at Rowan University, explains the difference.

He says that this is the way their respective ancestors (Pakicetus for whales and Tiktaalik for fish) moved, and they obviously haven’t had the time to change their habits despite making transitions from land to water (whales) and water to land (fish ancestor) during the assumed tens of millions of years, and then the poor fish had to get wet again.

Tales like these might be entertaining, but they’re definitely not based on facts.

Source:

Geggel, Laura 2017. Tale of 2 Tails: Why Do Sharks and Whales Swim So Differently? Live Science (20 May).

Jumping Parrots Inspire Origin of Flight Storytelling

Pacific Parrotlets. Image courtesy of markaharper1, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).





Joel Kontinen

When it comes to watching what birds do, it’s a small step from operational science to a just so story about how dinosaurs learnt to fly.

Here’s the latest version, courtesy of the journal Science:

“If you’ve ever watched a bird hop from branch to branch in search of food, you’ve caught a glimpse at how prehistoric flying dinosaurs foraged among forest trees.”

Here’s their "proof":

“That’s what researchers are saying after they trained four Pacific parrotlets (Forpus coelestis)—small, pastel-colored parrots about 13 centimeters long—to jump and fly for millet seed rewards. The researchers designed a cage decked out with perches that doubled as sensors to measure the birds’ leg forces, and surrounded the cages with high-speed cameras to study the birds’ wing beats as they moved between branches.”

If the next branch was near, the parrot jumped. If it was a bit further, it jumped and flapped its wings.

Then, the researchers used this data to figure out how some extinct birds that they define as “birdlike dinosaurs” took to the air:

“Archaeopteryx and Microraptor —feathered dinosaurs that likely flew or glided between trees—would have had the most success at boosting the range of their long jumps by 20%. The larger and heavier feathered dinosaurs Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx would not have been able to generate enough force from a wing beat to support their body weight or significantly increase their long jumps. The scientists surmise that Archaeopteryx developed an edge over other tree-foraging competitors by using their jumping and wing flapping to minimize energy expenditure while foraging for food in their trees. Thus, long jump Olympians of the Archaeopteryx world may have spurred the evolution of flight.”

The problem with this scenario is that it is pure Darwinian storytelling that sees birds evolving from dinosaurs.

Several studies suggest that birds and dinosaurs lived at the same time.

In addition, Archaeopteryx had the flight feathers of modern birds.

Source:

Cross, Ryan. 2017. Watch these tiny parrots reveal how dinosaurs may have learned to fly. Science (17 May).

Language Evolution Is Still a Naturalistic Mystery

No comprendo. Image courtesy of Thomas Lersch, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.5).



Joel Kontinen

Introducing a new book on language evolution, New Scientist contributor Alun Anderson writes: “I much prefer a speculative account of how language might have evolved to an invocation of miracles.”

Despite its name - The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From (University of Chicago Press, 2017) - Michael Corballis does not disclose the truth about language.

Anderson begins his review by acknowledging that our language skills are extraordinary:

“HUMAN language has long appeared miraculous. It has enabled us to accumulate knowledge, build cultures and conquer the planet, making us a creature seemingly apart from the rest of the animal world.”

Anderson says that Corballis, an emeritus professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, mentions two plausible explanations, only to reject them:

“During the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace doubted whether natural selection could explain such a unique power. In our century, Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who has dominated linguistics for 60 years, has supported a hypothesis that language and thought arose suddenly within the past 100,000 years.

In The Truth About Language, Michael Corballis rejects all such ‘miraculist’ explanations. He lays out a plausible route by which spoken language might have evolved, not from the calls of our primate ancestors, but through stages in which a language of gesture and mime dominated.”

Corballis suggests that humans acquired language by thinking back on what they had done, for instance on the details of a hunting trip, and on what they planned to do in the future.

This might merely be a just-so story, as both Corballis and Anderson admit. But they have nothing better to suggest.

Language evolution continues to be an enigma for Darwinists for several weighty reasons:

• Monkey brains were not made for talking.
• Apes cannot learn grammar.
• Darwinian stories cannot explain why we speak while apes cannot do so.
• Darwinian explanations are merely speculations.
• The Darwinian theory of mind fails to account for language acquisition.

Source:

Anderson, Alun. 2017. How the brain’s ability to time travel may have led to speech. New Scientist (5 April).

New Darwinian Water to Land Transition Story: Big Eyes Did It

Tiktaalik: I spy with my little eye something beginning with m. Image courtesy of Nobu Tamura, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).



Joel Kontinen

Science Daily calls it a provocative study, and it is.

Darwinian tales tend to be goal-oriented or teleological.

Why do we have four limbs? an evolutionist might ask. The answer: because we have a belly.

This brings us to the new water-to-land transition story:

“A new study suggests it was the power of the eyes and not the limbs that first led our aquatic ancestors to make the leap from water to land. The researchers discovered that eyes nearly tripled in size before -- not after -- the water-to-land transition. Crocodile-like animals saw easy meals on land and then evolved limbs that enabled them to get there, the researchers argue.”

So, marine animals were able to direct their evolution to get “easy meals”.

This is exactly what biologist Aldemaro Romero warned researchers of in an essay he wrote in 2016: He pointed out that they should not expect to see predestination or preadaptation in biology, as evolution had no plan or purpose.

In other words, the blind watchmaker can’t see.

However, everything in us and the animal kingdom looks designed and the most logical explanation is that it is designed.


Source:

Northwestern University. 2017. Vision, not limbs, led fish onto land 385 million years ago. Science Daily. (7 March).

Fishy Fish Evolution Story in New Scientist: Blenny Fish Are Evolving into Land Creatures

Tasmanian Blenny (Parablennius tasmanianus). Image courtesy of Nick Eades. Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).




Joel Kontinen

New Scientist describes it as evolution in action. A little blenny fish is probably seeking refuge from predators by climbing up and around wet rocks when the tide comes in.

This prompts the popular science magazine to remind its readers of the assumed evolutionary transition from sea to land:

“Fish first began crawling onto dry land about 400 million years ago, kicking off an evolutionary chain of events that led to humans.”

Darwinian stories tend to be entertaining but they are often a bit fishy.

But without them, evolution would be boring.

Blenny fish come in many shapes, sizes and colours. New Scientist is reporting on the extraordinary behaviour of blennies living in the waters of Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands:

“At low tide, blennies are commonly found swimming in rock pools around the edges of the island. But when high tide moves in, they climb up to dry land and shuffle around the rocks until the tide retreats.”

So, the fish are not moving permanently to land; they only spend some time out of the water, just like mudskippers do.

Some evolutionists thought they saw superfast evolution in mudskippers, but they forgot that these fish would dry out if they didn’t return to the sea.

Like mudskippers, blennies use gills to breath which are good for breathing in water but not so good on land. If they tarry too long on dry land, they will eventually die.

End of evolution.

While fish might behave in bizarre ways, it does not mean that they are evolving into something else.

Even walking fish will not solve the Darwinian enigma as they won’t leave their watery world.

Source:

Klein, Alice. 2017. These fish are evolving right now to become land-dwellers. New Scientist (16 March).