In an online note to his recent book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body Author Neil Shubin, who directed the anatomy course at the Univrsity of Chicago Medical school, writes,

It turns out that being a paleontologist is a huge advantage in teaching human anatomy. Why? The best roadmaps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals. The simplest way to teach students the nerves in the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks. The easiest roadmap to their limbs lies in fish. Reptiles are a real help with the structure of the brain. The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are simpler versions of ours.

The focus of Shubin's original study was Tiktaalik, a 375-million-year-old fish discovered in 2004 in the Canadian Arctic (also called "fishapod"). This early fish had a functional neck, eyes in the top of its head, and front fins that were strong enough to function somewhat like feet, propping up its body, wqhih suggests that it was developing along the lines of an amphibians. Amphibians, such as frogs and toads, live their adult lives on land but their early lives in water, as did most early life forms. Amphibians are considered to be the earliest vertebrates (animals with backbones). Tiktaalik helps illustrate the difference between the approach of scientists who are convinced Darwinists and that of scientists who view the problems of evolution primarily in terms of information theory (intelligent design). The Darwinist says, There! - we have found a missing link, so now we KNOW! what happened. For example, from the Time Magazine article about "fishapod"), we learn, regarding Tiktaalik's front fin,

On land, observes Shubin's collaborator Ted Daeschler, chair of vertebrate zoology at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, such an appendage would have been worse than useless. But it would have been more than adequate for propping the animal's head above the water so that it could survey its surroundings or for anchoring it underwater as it waited to ambush its prey. The advantage of being able to gulp air through lungs as well as gills would likewise have been immediate, given that the fishapod made its home in warm, shallow waters that were frequently rendered inhospitable by decaying vegetation.

Actually, we do not know whether any of that happened. Ted Daeschler assumes that Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation) somehow produced these changes. Thus, picking and choosing among the environment conditions that we also assume to have existed, we construct a story about how it happened without any specific evidence.

The information theorist I consulted had an entirely different approach to the problem. He said that we do not know what happened, because we do not know how the information that produced this change came to be in the system. We have observed only the change itself, not the arrival of the information. The problem, he said, is not with the changes that are required to produce an amphibian but with determining exactly how such changes came about:

There are two ways to look at the problem in going from fish to Tiktaalik and then from Tiktaalik to amphibian. If we merely look at a body plan then it doesn't take too much imagination to say that the fish evolved into Tiktaalik and then the Tiktaalik evolved into the amphibian through natural selection. That is a very crude way of looking at evolution, however .... very 19th centuryish.

It's kind of like looking at a laptop computer and a pizza box ... there are similarities in structure and an argument could be made (provided one did not open either the laptop or the pizza box) that natural processes had turned the pizza box into a shape of a laptop. The other approach (more appropriate to the 21st century) is to look at the coding changes in the genome that would be required to go from a fish to Tiktaalik and from Tiktaalik to an amphibian.

It never ceases to amaze me that Darwinists can so blithely create a scenario based on morphology and not so much as breath one sentence about the massive coding changes that would be required. Have they no concept of 21st century information requirements? Of course it is true that we do not have the DNA of Tiktaalik, but we do have DNA for Coelecanth and for amphibians. Decent science would require, at the very least, a careful analysis of the coding difference between Coelecanth and some representative amphibian before a scientist would go out on a limb and announce that the evolutionary change (without any ID input) is even feasible, let alone represented by Tiktaalik.

One reason why the intelligent design controversy is intractable is that many scientists are stuck in the primitive mode of discovering that a change occurred and declaring that "Darwin's theory explains this!" They then make up stories to show how Darwin's theory could explain it.

You know the sort of thing: "Tiktaalik survived by propping itself up and eating small fish in shallow waters." Maybe Tiktaalik did that. But that does not explain how he found himself to be in any position to do it.

That kind of just-so story will not wash any more, because the enormous inner complexity of the design of life forms requires a more detailed accounting than that.

Darwin's theory is simply not adequate to the task, and the resources spent propping it up would be better used otherwise.