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In this section: Chance
or Design? • The Scientific Method •
Life in a Test Tube? • The
Eye • Irreducible Complexity •
Anything Can Happen? •
Evolution or Selection? • Real Examples of
Evolution • "Do You Feel Lucky?" •
(Abio)Genesis 1:1 • Life
from Comets? • Life on Mars? •
Richard Dawkins • A Brief
History of Slime...
Chance adaptations or
Intelligent design?
Organs of Extreme
Design and Perfection
Ever think about how different the world would look
if your eyes weren't so perfect?
How would the world look if your eye couldn't respond to changes in light,
motion, or distance, or if you couldn't see color or in such fine detail?
If you've ever used a camera, you know how any error in lighting, focus or
motion can ruin a photo. Turning light into even the worst of the above images requires
incredible technology. Eyes are pretty useless unless they are complete and
perfected.
So how could eyes "evolve?"
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Evolution theory has never adequately explained how organs
of extreme design and perfection could "evolve."
Was this problem presented when you were taught evolution? Even Darwin
recognized the challenge it posed to his theory in the chapter entitled "Difficulties
of the Theory" in his book "The Origin of Species":
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"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." Charles
Darwin, 1859 |
Now, in the following paragraphs, Darwin postulates how the eye might
have evolved through numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye
to one complex and perfect, but is this the most likely or
reasonable explanation? How did simple, blind organisms figure out, from
their world of darkness, that:
- there was "light" to "see,"
- that it could pass through a "transparent" tissue,
- to form an upside-down image of objects at different distances by varying the curvature
of the tissue,
- which could be converted into millions of electronic impulses on a retina,
- so the image could be turned right-side up in the brain, and
- that two eyes (no more, no less) would be required to determine depth and distance in a
three dimensional world?
If you're viewing this page with a 1024x768 resolution monitor,
you're seeing 786,432 pixels of light. A high speed Internet connection
typically delivers web
content at around 500,000 bytes of information per second. In comparison, your
eye sees about 125,000,000 pixels of light through five distinct kinds of
neurons, processing about 10,000,000 point images per second. Your eye is remarkably efficient, able to produce a signal with only one
photon.
How do we realistically explain by chance and adaptation the design and manufacture
of an organ that
far surpasses the technology of cameras and computers which have taken the collective efforts of mankind
centuries to develop?
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