Score One More for Evolution--Magical Disappearing Fish Eyes

OK PEOPLE. Evolution is a fact. The details are up for grabs--that's how science goes. The book of Genesis, the seven days, the whole shebang, is an allegory, ok?
Now, can we just get over it and stop being stupid jerks and ruining kids' science educations? Really.

So we all know that deep down in dark caves lives oodles of weird animals without eyes. You've got your blind shrimp, your blind isopod, your blind salamander, and your blind fishy friend, the charismatic Astyanax jordani, the subject of a big huffy fit courtesy Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute.

Luskin's argument is that loss-of-function mutations--i.e. mutations which occur randomly, screwing up a functioning gene so it "breaks"--are not contrary to the idea of intelligent design. The idea seems to be that God created something a certain way, and then something in our imperfect, corrupted world caused some oops to happen in the DNA that messed up God's perfect design. Ignoring the flaws in that argument for a moment (If that were so, and loss-of-function mutations were just unfortunate mistakes, how would they get fixed in a population? Could it be--gasp! natural selection??), let's examine Luskin's claim briefly.

He claims that the only thing that "Darwinism" (what a bad, incorrect term) cannot explain is gain-of-function, when an organism actually acquires a new trait.

Unfortunately for him, this loss-of-function in Astyanax jordani is actually a GAIN-of-function: a developmental gene called sonic hedgehog is actually upregulated, which increases skin sensitivity (beneficial to cave life, no?) while having the side-effect of disrupting eye development. PZ Myers has a great discussion of the flaws in Luskin's "argument" and the details of how A. jordani lost its eyes over at the Panda's Thumb.

Take that, Discovery Institute.