In case you missed the fanfare of publicity associated with this news last month, “Sri Lankan scientists have identified a new genus of fresh water fish and named it after the evolutionary biologist and renowned atheist Richard Dawkins.”1,2
The fish in this new genus are not themselves ‘new’ to science. These small tropical fish are already well known as ‘barbs’, a popular aquarium fish. The new genus, Dawkinsia, comprises nine species3 found in south Asia which were formerly assigned to the genus Puntius, comprised of around 120 species.4 ‘Friendly Atheist’ Hemant Mehta:
‘Your move, Creationists.’
Our ‘move’? What’s there of substance to respond to? 7 If you remove the evolutionary phraseology of Pethiyagoda and his colleagues, all they’ve done is study the existing diversity of a south Asian fish genus, subsequently deciding to re-classify some into a new genus, with nine species. None of this is any cause for evolutionists to gloat. As we’ve pointed out many times: diversity, adaptation, speciation, natural selection are in no way evidence of fish-to-philosophers evolution; the modern notion of ‘species’ is not akin to the biblical ‘kind’, and so on (and on, and on).
Like the poor fisherman who can only tell his ‘fish tales’ about the fish that got away as he has no evidence to show for it, so too there’s no evidence here of any evolution—we are simply expected to accept the evolutionists’ word on it. But unlike the honest fisherman who truly did observe ‘the one that got away’, there’s something fishy here about the evolutionists’ Dawkinsia tales of its origin, because they did not observe evolution. As Richard Dawkins himself has famously said, “Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.”8