interesting but obvious.

"advancing an unusual hypothesis: those ancient creatures who first crawled out of the water onto land may have done so because they figured out there was an "informational benefit" from seeing through air, as opposed to water"

If taken literally, because :they figured out", smacks of the Lamarckian principle of "inheritance of acquired characteristics" or soft inheritance. The idea that evolution can be willed be an individual to occur because it gave them an environmental advantage. A concept that was corrected with the advent of Darwinian evolution.

Fortunately the author clarified later along in the article:
"They found that, over about 12 million years, there had been a tripling of eye size during that transitional period, from 13 millimeters before to 36 millimeters after. Even more intriguing, that increase began before the full transition from water to land was complete. This suggested that those aquatic creatures who learned to poke their eyes above water, like a crocodile, to find new food sources on the nearby shore had stumbled upon "the gateway drug to terrestriality,"

Awesome