Please note the following words used in the NOVA documentary:
“What we THINK happened”, “They WOULD HAVE got their legs first”, “then gradually PERHAPS moved into shallower and shallower water”,
In every scientific discipline words like “scientists think”, “we believe”, “perhaps”, “would have”, “could have”, “might have”, “possibly”, “maybe” are used in describing the evolutionary process.
Is any of this actual science? Does any of it meet the scientific method....observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable?
In the current “Climate Change (formerly Global Warming) debate” Scientists had the worldview that it was true and then twisted and turned the evidence to fit their worldview. The same thing has been going on in the Creation vs. Evolution debate for years.
“We know evolution is true, therefore what would have had to have happened to get from a cell in a mud puddle to a human being”?
Conjecture, conjecture, promising bit of data that might fit our worldview, more conjecture, leap of faith, unverifiable generalization, more conjecture and voila.
This then is followed by the inevitable shot across the bow of anyone who says the Emporer has no clothes. “What are you nuts? Evolution is a fact you flat earth idiot.”
Browbeat me all you want.....I believe in our Creator.
Yes.
The part where they dig the bones out of the rock is science.
If you don't like their conjectures, guesses, and postulations, you are free to develop your own. But keep in mind that the late Devonian was just a little bit different from what we see around us now.
From where do we derive the word tetrapod? Why do most animals have the form of four limbs?
Why do we have no more than five fingers? Acanthostega was experimenting with eight!
How did animals, and by extension those curious bipeds with four limbs and minimally effective dentition, come to be the way they are?
Answering those questions, and having your answers come to be respected opinion ... that's actual science.
You've shoved the goalposts. NicknamedBob certainly did, in his reply, directly and relevantly respond to -- and refute -- your assertion. You claimed it flatly impossible for legs to exist in a purely aquatic creature because there was no way they could be adaptive:
Why would a fish that is adapting to a water environment grow legs and walk out on land?Natural Selection, by definition, would select the legs out of the process because there would be no survival advantage in a water environment.
NicknamedBob gave you both a fully aquatic creature that did have actual legs, down to digits (Acanthostega) and an environment conducive to such an adaptation (the shallow, swampy, vegetation choked waters which living Acanthostega appear to have inhabited).
Now, to catch up with your goalposts...
Is any of this actual science? Does any of it meet the scientific method....observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable?
NicknamedBob already did a fine job answering this. Science does indeed combine speculation with fact. Scientists formulate questions, conjectures, hypotheses and theories, and then test those against observed fact.
I'll just add that the particular case of Acanthostega (and similar fully aquatic tetrapods) illustrates that such conjectures are falsifiable. Because, in fact, you had it backwards, at least as to the older evolutionary speculations. Most evolutionists did not initially presume that fish first grew legs in the water and then walked out on land.
The predominant view used to be that the first fish to start spending time on land, i.e. ancestral tetrapods, did so with far more primitive limbs, little more than modified fins. The general idea was of a proto-amphibian with limbs somewhat more robust than, but otherwise similar to, those of lobe-finned fishes. Only after these creatures began spending time out of the water would they have started to develop full legs with digits.
This view was falsified when Acanthostega and his kin were discovered. These fossils made it clear that fish had developed full limbs, and thus become tetrapods, before they moved onto land. Precisely because they were behaving like scientists and responding to contradictory facts, evolutionists had to change their view about the evolutionary sequence of events.