Lemonodor spotted this interesting report by Richard Dawkins of a simulation experiment on evolution of a camera-type eye from photo-sensitive tissue.
Creationism has enduring appeal, and the reason is not far to seek. It is not, at least for most of the people I encounter, because of a commitment to the literal truth of Genesis or some other tribal origin story. Rather, it is that people discover for themselves the beauty and complexity of the living world and conclude that it "obviously" must have been designed. Those creationists who recognise that Darwinian evolution provides at least some sort of alternative to their scriptural theory often resort to a slightly more sophisticated objection. They deny the possibility of evolutionary intermediates. "X must have been designed by a Creator," people say, "because half an X would not work at all. All the parts of X must have been put together simultaneously; they could not have evolved gradually."
Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye, which is already better than 48 per cent, and the difference is significant. A more ponderous show of weight seems to lie behind the inevitable supplementary: "Speaking as a physicist, I cannot believe that there has been enough time for an organ as complicated as the eye to have evolved from nothing. Do you really think there has been enough time?" Both questions stem from the Argument from Personal Incredulity. Audiences nevertheless appreciate an answer, and I have usually fallen back on the sheer magnitude of geological time.
It now appears that the shattering enormity of geological time is a steam hammer to crack a peanut. A recent study by a pair of Swedish scientists, Dan Nilson and Susanne Pelger, suggests that a ludicrously small fraction of that time would have been plenty. When one says "the" eye, by the way, one implicitly means the vertebrate eye, but serviceable image-forming eyes have evolved between 40 and 60 times, independently from scratch, in many different invertebrate groups. Among these 40-plus independent evolutions, at least nine distinct design principles have been discovered, including pinhole eyes, two kinds of camera-lens eyes, curved-reflector ("satellite dish") eyes, and several kinds of compound eyes. Nilsson and Pelger have concentrated on camera eyes with lenses, such as are well developed in vertebrates and octopuses.
Striking stuff.
I STILL DONT DIG HOW DID A SEEING EYE IN WHATEVER FORM, DEVELOP. EITHER IT SEES OR IT DOESNT?
Posted by: SOLO | January 11, 2005 at 05:34 AM
Just to be sure: did you follow the link to Richard Dawson's site and read the rest of the story?
The basic point is that any awareness of light is an advantage. The fact that there are different types of functioning eye already shows that "seeing" should not be narrowly defined as "seeing as perfectly-sighted humans do". So no, seeing isn't binary. Being sensitive to light without any ability to resolve detail is part of a spectrum with a continuous grading of benefit.
Posted by: Hamish | January 11, 2005 at 10:02 AM
This is my opinion...Those who believe that the creation of the eye happened by chance are blaspheming to the creator.
"At conception, the DNA code that controls the eye tells the baby’s body to begin growing optic nerves. A million tiny optic nerves being to grow from the eye, through the flesh, toward the optic section of the baby’s brain. At the same time, a million optic nerves begin growing through the flesh toward the baby’s eye. Each of these one million nerves need to meet up with its matching optic nerve to allow vision to function properly.
Every day, hundreds of babies are born with the ability to see. Their bodies, having positioned one million tiny optic nerves from each eye to meet their matching optic nerve growing out of the baby’s brain. " -Grant R. Jeffrey
(Book: Creation: Remarkable Evidence of God's Design)
This cannot happen by chance.
Posted by: Jeanette | April 27, 2007 at 03:00 AM
Ummm, OK. A few things.
1) Blasphemy is an act of speech. One cannot blaspheme by believing something.
2) The concept of blasphemy was constructed by organised religion in order to justify the suppression, and brutal suppression at that, of dissent. It has nothing to do with belief, and everything to do with power. Freedom from this sort of oppression was won with great difficulty and at great personal cost to those who fought for it, to the enormous benefit of all of us. To continue to use such medieval language from the comfort afforded by those freedoms is absurd.
3) "Chance"---random mutation---is a very important, but very small part of the evolutionary process. Neither Darwin nor Dawkins have claimed that babies came about "by chance".
4) The quotation you provide invokes wonder at the complexity and beauty of life. I share that wonder, and find that some understanding of the mechanisms by which evolution can generate such complexity increases this wonder. The quotation does nothing, however, to support your position, given that, ...
5) "This cannot happen by chance" is not an argument. In addition to the red herring of "chance", it both begs the question and unreasonably transfers the burden of proof from you to me; three logical fallacies in five words is quite impressive.
Posted by: Hamish Harvey | April 28, 2007 at 05:23 PM
Blasphemy is taking the LORD's name in vain. By saying that the human eye evolved by random mutations is taking the LORD's name in vain which is blasphemy. Besides, the Bible (NIV) tells us numerously, that the LORD created us...including our eyes!!! (Psalm 94:9, Proverbs 20:12)
The eye is absolutely amazing in its complexity. Its amazing how the eye can see...The many layers in the retina that are microscopically thin.
One thing that strikes me, is that the image that is projected on the retina is upside-down. But the brain automaticly turns it rightside-up!
Our eye can also focus and adjusts to different light settings.
The rods and cones are also absolutly amazing. There are so many of the packed in the retina that it strikes me as almost imposible but I believe that God created the eye so nothing is impossible with God.
I'm going to conclude with the text,
"You have created me inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." (Psalm 139:13-14).
Posted by: Jeanette | May 01, 2007 at 02:36 AM
Commented by Charles Darwin himself, he said, "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
Posted by: Klaudia | June 06, 2007 at 05:16 AM
Klaudia: what point are you making?
Darwin continues:
"When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ["the voice of the people = the voice of God "], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."
I feel I should point out that I haven't read "The Origin of Species". Despite this fact, it was immediately clear from the phrasing of the quotation you give that Darwin does not share the view described. Google filled in the obvious blank.
Darwin, in any case, is far from the last word on evolution.
Posted by: Hamish Harvey | June 11, 2007 at 12:23 PM
To Klaudia, and Hamish:
Commented by Charles Darwin himself, he said, "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
That, by itself, is a good point.
Seeing as Darwin wrote the book on evolution, it is rather obvious, even to us redneck creationist moonshine drinking doubters of evolution that the above could not be his complete point. He does indeed follow it with a bunch of BS that only adherents of evolution would find credible.
Moreover, the argument that the eye could not have just 'evolved' under any circumstances does not stem from 'Personal Incredulity'. It is just the hard mathematical science of statistics. It is just statistically impossible that the uncanny synchronicity of, for instance, the eye's design could have just fallen into place under any circumstances without some 'help from above.' You evolutionists have long ago been snookered by science, but I have to admire your ability to come up with sonorous, superior sounding arguments to every point we make without ever tiring. Kind of like the Energiser Bunny, you just keep going. (Hey! Maybe that's an example of 'evolution' today, come to think of it...)
Posted by: Steven McDaniel | September 28, 2007 at 02:53 PM