"Your Inner Fish" Chapter 3- Handy Genes

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Oh goody, genetics. Unfortunately it is more of the same- a common design used for organism development is now evidence for common ancestry. No saying how all those switches evolved in the first. No saying what DETERMINES what is to be developed. Nope common switches that help control development.

And yup just as with the PAX6 gene being able to be transferred between fruit-fly and mouse- the fly developed fly eyes- they took the sonic hedgehog gene from a mouse and used it in a fish. It worked just as the fish gene would, producing FISH parts.

I would expect this in a common design scenario. Switches can be used in multiple different scenarios.

So no, there wsn't an experiment that took fish embryos and had them develop hands- Shubin was just teasing us:

What if you could do an experiment in which you treated the embryo of a fish with various chemicals and actually changed its body, making part of its fin look like a hand?

Nope, just a tease. No one knows what determines what type of body part will develop. All Shubin et al., have done is uncover controllers, not what determines the type. And nothing that can take a fish fin with minute bones and turn them into the robust bones found in Tiktaalik.

So once again evidence for common design is used as evidence for common ancestry.

Another problem Shubin, and all evos have, is their "gene-centric" view fathered by August Weismann. Dr Denton puts that to rest in his article in "Uncommon Dissent":

To understand the challenge to the “superwatch” model by the erosion of the gene-centric view of nature, it is necessary to recall August Weismann’s seminal insight more than a century ago regarding the need for genetic determinants to specify organic form. As Weismann saw so clearly, in order to account for the unerring transmission through time with precise reduplication, for each generation of “complex contingent assemblages of matter” (superwatches), it is necessary to propose the existence of stable abstract genetic blueprints or programs in the genes- he called them “determinants”- sequestered safely in the germ plasm, away from the ever varying and destabilizing influences of the extra-genetic environment.

Such carefully isolated determinants would theoretically be capable of reliably transmitting contingent order through time and specifying it reliably each generation. Thus, the modern “gene-centric” view of life was born, and with it the heroic twentieth century effort to identify Weismann’s determinants, supposed to be capable of reliably specifying in precise detail all the contingent order of the phenotype. Weismann was correct in this: the contingent view of form and indeed the entire mechanistic conception of life- the superwatch model- is critically dependent on showing that all or at least the vast majority of organic form is specified in precise detail in the genes.

Yet by the late 1980s it was becoming obvious to most genetic researchers, including myself, since my own main research interest in the ‘80s and ‘90s was human genetics, that the heroic effort to find information specifying life’s order in the genes had failed. There was no longer the slightest justification for believing there exists anything in the genome remotely resembling a program capable of specifying in detail all the complex order of the phenotype. The emerging picture made it increasingly difficult to see genes as Weismann’s “unambiguous bearers of information” or view them as the sole source of the durability and stability of organic form. It is true that genes influence every aspect of development, but influencing something is not the same as determining it. Only a small fraction of all known genes, such as the developmental fate switching genes, can be imputed to have any sort of directing or controlling influence on form generation. From being “isolated directors” of a one-way game of life, genes are now considered to be interactive players in a dynamic two-way dance of almost unfathomable complexity, as described by Keller in The Century of The Gene.

It's not the genes. It ain't the genome. It ain't the same ole genes used differently. And that is the main reason why evolutionism is a failure.