Some people make whole careers on hand-waving.
Whole fields of study seem to be hand-waving.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your post.
Now I’d like to see these guys from Bath now make a prediction based on their theory that can be tested in a hard science way, eg comparative genomics.
Then see if their prediction holds.
Watch the existing fish.
They are supposed to evolve fins to legs very quickly, right?
Sit by the beach, or set up a few traps on the shoreline.
Hmmm maybe that’s why we are wasting fresh water on the Delta Smelt.
It is “hard” science. Paleontology is the study of fossils including comparisons of morphologicaly similar fossils. Of course, over deep time, DNA comparisons are impossible. That doesn’t mean that observational science doesn’t exist.