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New eyes for blind cave fish?
A remarkable
experiment leads to much evolutionary misinterpretation

by
Carl Wieland

Fish living in caves, in permanent darkness, are blind, with
apparent ‘scars’ where their eyes should be. In the quarter of a century
in which I have written and spoken on creation issues, I have often raised
the matter of eyeless fish to argue against evolution, despite the
fact that I believe that these fish arose from ones that originally had
eyes. I also agree with evolutionists about the fairly obvious mechanism
by which they think this happened. Nevertheless, I hope it will be clear
from what follows that I find it exceedingly strange that some
evolutionists would gloat about this as a ‘classic proof’ of evolution.1

Note that such fish often are, in all other respects,
identical to the same species of fish living at the surface and having
eyes.

Imagine a situation in which a group of such ‘normal’ fish
swim into a stream which enters an underground cave, and become trapped in
this pitch-dark environment. Their eyes are completely useless here.

But eyes do not ‘disappear’ just because they are no longer
needed. The fish’s DNA would have programmed into it the instructions on
constructing eyes, and the code on the DNA does not ‘know’ that the eye is
no longer needed, so it will keep on manufacturing eyes, generation after
generation.

However, due to the effects of the Curse on all creation (Genesis
3:19, Romans
8:20–22), genetic copying errors (mutations) arise in all living
things. In fact, in a moderate-sized population, many of these errors
occur in each generation. It is not hard to see how one of these could
result in a gene that usually ‘switches on’ eye development being
corrupted, or somehow ‘switched off’, via mutation.

In a normal above-ground situation, such eyeless fish would
probably never survive much past early infancy, because they would be so
handicapped both in locating food and escaping predators. So for all
practical purposes, we never see eyeless fish in the wild where there is
sunlight.

However, in the cave, it is a different matter. The eyeless
type no longer suffers this disadvantage compared to its compatriots. Not
only that, the eyeless ones even have an advantage over the others. This
is because, as fish bumped into rocks and cave walls in the darkness, the
eyed ones would be likely to injure their eyes. The delicate tissue of
eyes is prone to injury, which would allow harmful bacteria to enter,
leading to infection and often death.

The eyed fish would thus have a lesser chance of surviving
to produce offspring. Those fish carrying the ‘eyeless’ genetic defect
would have a greater chance of passing it on to the next generation, so it
would not take many generations under such circumstances for all the fish
to be of the ‘eyeless’ type.

Time
and chance can't explain life's amazing design—get your answers
here!

Not By Chance!
Dr Lee Spetner

Dr Spetner's book aims a death-blow
at the heart of the whole neo-Darwinism story. The crucial
battleground has always been the origin of information. Spetner
shows that time and chance cannot produce new (more) genetic
information. This book is a must for everyone who desires to defend
the Bible in this increasingly 'educated' society.

See also
this
review by Dr Carl Wieland.

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YOUR COPY TODAY

But this classic example of mutation/selection causing
adaptation to a new environment is also a classic example of a mutation
causing a downhill change. It is not showing us how the
first stages of a new, complex adaptation could arise, it is merely
showing us how complex information coding for great engineering design is
being corrupted or lost. The grand-scale theory of evolution
— that microbes have become millipedes, magnolias, and microbiologists —
demands that huge amounts of new information, of true genetic novelty,
have arisen over millions of years. To show such information arising from
natural processes is the real challenge for evolution. It is a challenge
which the renowned Darwinist Richard Dawkins was unable to answer, as
shown in the video Frog
to a Prince (see top right; as well as refutation of
Skeptic’s attack and refutation
of Dawkins’ later response).

Even if one tiny example could be found where information
had arisen by chance mutation, Dr Lee Spetner’s classic bookNot
By Chance (see left; as well as this review) shows that
neo-Darwinian theory requires literally hundreds to be observable today.
So far, all the examples studied (including the handful of ‘helpful
defects’, like the loss of eyes in cave fish, or wingless beetles on windy
islands [see Beetle
Bloopers]) show a loss of information.

The fascinating experiment (by researchers from the
University of Maryland, USA) that has brought blind cave fish back into
the news was one in which young eyeless fish had lenses implanted in them
from the same species of fish (Astyanax mexicanus) living at the
surface. Eight days later, the blind fish seemed to be regrowing eyes.
After two months, they had a ‘large restored eye with a distinct pupil,
cornea and iris. In addition, the retina of the restored eye showed rod
photoreceptor cells …’2

The researchers are not saying that the fish developed
sight, which would require regrowth of nerve connections to the brain and
more. This experiment is of great interest in helping us understand more
about the pathways by which genes express the development of certain
structures in the embryo. The following may be helpful in understanding
what has taken place:

It has long been known that during the development of
certain frog embryos, for instance, the lens not only appears first, it
acts as an ‘inducer’ of the development of most of the rest of the eye.
Thus, if the lens from one embryo is surgically embedded into another
embryo at a spot different from where the eye normally develops, an eye
will start to form at that location.

Both in the above example, and that of the cave fish, the
development of the eye structures can only take place if the organism
into which the lens is transplanted has the genetic instructions present
in its DNA to manufacture such structures.

This indicates that the mutation by which the fish
initially became ‘eyeless’ did not somehow ‘delete’ all of the ‘eye
information’, but just interfered with the process leading to the eye’s
development. An analogy with computers would be deleting files on a
computer — the information is not deleted, just the record of its
location on the hard disk. If the data as such were not still there,
‘undelete’ programs would not be possible.

In the example here, the mutation most probably just
blocked the proper formation of the lens. Without the lens to induce the
rest of the eye to form, it won’t. This is supported by the fact that in
the embryos of eyeless cave fish, eyes start to form, but the lens that
has started to form deteriorates, and the other structures remain
undeveloped.

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that such optic
induction experiments have been successful on any organism in a
post-embryonic stage. As such it is important in future embryological
research into the immensely ingenious, complex, and still very poorly
understood, processes by which an adult organism develops from a tiny
fertilized egg.

Sadly, though not surprisingly, this has been described in
such a way as to promote the ‘evolution is fact’ idea — even though it has
nothing to do with demonstrating that microbes could turn into man (and as
shown, the change is in the opposite direction required). It has
been described as ‘Eye parts lost during millions of years of evolution
were restored in just a matter of days’.3
We have already seen that it is misleading to describe the loss of the
ability to produce eyes as evolution’, because it gives rise to the
impression that it has something to do with how there came to be such
things as fish with eyes in the first place. In addition, there is not the
slightest bit of evidence that the process of losing them took millions of
years. In fact, it would be surprising if it took more than a few dozen
generations, or just a few short years, given the scenario described
earlier.

Indeed, considering the supposed creative power of
‘evolution’, it is remarkable that these fish, allegedly separated for
millions of years, are so near-identical to those living at the surface
that even evolution’s most hardened ‘true believers’ concede that they
should be given the same species name. The notion that they have not been
cut off from each other for anywhere near as long, directly fits the
facts.

References

A recent example is Jerry Coyne, an
evolutionist from the University of Chicago, who reviewed Niles
Eldredge’s anti-creationist book The Triumph of Evolution in the
Chicago Tribune, July 30, 2000 Sunday, Books; Pg. 4. Among other
things, Coyne berated Eldredge for not mentioning ‘some of the classic
and most powerful arguments for evolution [including] the nonfunctional
eyes of cave organisms, which evolved from sighted creatures.’ Return
to text.

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/07/000728082041.htm>,
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/examiner/hotnews/stories/28/fish.dtl&type=science>;
both
last accessed 9 August 2000. Return
to text.

Ref. 2. Return
to text.

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