cool book

Either a God of the gaps who was having an off day and lacking any imagination copied his own defective eye design or some sort of ancient worm with simple photosensitive eye patches that was the last common chordate ancestor of both mammals and cephalopods hundreds of millions of years ago.

Vertebrate eyes made the completely arbitrary choice to develop wiring on the front surface of the sensor but cephalopods followed a different path and ultimately one with fewer limitations. Either one was better than what went before and neither so bad as to result in extinction.

Theirs is the true global optimum but the vertebrates got lumbered with an inferior design. It was the flip of a coin. In another universe the situation could easily be reversed and we would not have a blind spot.

It is slightly surprising that the creatures with the best eyes did not win out in the race for supremacy but they clearly did not. Insufficient advantage to make a real difference.

Cephalopods and octopuses in particular are very intelligent for the comparatively small number of neurons they have available to them. They are about as close to an alien intelligence as we will ever encounter without finding ET. They are capable of some remarkable feats.

It didn't. Cordata evolution has improved the eye from the initial primitive version to as good as it can having made that initial bad design decision of wiring and plumbing in front of the sensor.

Yes. But you clearly do not. Nature finds solutions that are good enough

- it doesn't necessarily find the global optimum.

Humans have a pretty unremarkable eyes really. About what you might expect to evolve in a non-specialist omnivore.

Hawks have better resolution and big cats have much better sensitivity.

Obviously you've got reading comprehension problems beccuse that's not something I wrote.

NOPE.

There are some fun links there!

All this comes about because our eyes are actually very poor as "cameras". Our brain tries to identify what all the parts of the picture might be, then extrapolates or interpolates in between, based on short term memory (what you saw as your eyes moved around), long term memory (and experience - knowledge of what is likely to be where you are looking), and more low-level, built-in patterns such as faces.

Once the brain has a 3-D model of what it thinks is there, this is rendered again - and that is what gives you the "image" you "see". (For many brain functions, the 3-D model is used directly rather than the recreated image.)

Mistakes in this process gives us optical illusions, hallucinations, false memories of details we have "seen", and so on.

It is also what gives us our imagination and creativity, so it's not all bad - but it all comes from the appallingly poor "design" of human eyes (in comparison to bird eyes, shrimp eyes, insect eyes, etc.).

Larkin does not understand evolution, or natural selection - he simply does not comprehend the concepts because they go against his fundamental beliefs.

A lot of creationists and "intelligent designer" fans start off with the fixed belief in god, and therefore anything that goes against their ideas of a creator god must be wrong, and any idea that is consistent with it must be right. (Yes, I know that does not follow logic - no one ever accused the "intelligent designer" of being logical!)

As far as I can tell, Larkin is a little different from others. He does not believe in a god. He believes in /himself/ - in a self-worshipping, god-like manner. He truly believes that he is special - that he knows more than everyone else, can do more than everyone else, and has the ability to generate "ideas" in a way no one else can do.

Thus if Larkin has had an idea about how life on earth came about, or how the organisms around us now evolved, it must be /true/. He is as convinced of that as a fundamentalist Christian is about what they read in Genesis. The religious fanatic says "it must be true because god said it", Larkin says "it must be true because /I/ said it".

Any scientist or scientific theory that goes against such beliefs must, therefore, be wrong. The religious fanatic says they are wrong because they are ungodly, Larkin says they are wrong because they lack vision, imagination, or "ideas". (Meaning /his/ ideas, of course - no one else can have an "idea" worthy of that name.)

Meanwhile, Larkin also likes to think of himself as logical and scientific. The only consistent way to combine his beliefs - that other scientists are wrong, while he is right and scientific - is for him to conclude that no one else "believes in evolution and natural selection".

Thus he sits back, smugly convinced of his own superiority over all others, while people who actually understand what the words mean, the sciences of evolution and abiogenesis (both in terms of what we know, and the limitations of our knowledge), and the scientific process in general - we are left frustrated and irritated by this mockery of human knowledge.

For a long time, I thought Larkin's misunderstandings and ignorance were due to his beliefs in magic DNA and his gullibility and his susceptibility to be wowed by big numbers he doesn't understand - but now it seems more likely that he is simply limited by his overwhelming (and, obviously, completely unjustified) belief in magic Larkin.

You are mixing cause and effect. This is the kind of mistake a lot of people - such as Larkin - make about evolution. They think evolution has a purpose and direction. I know /you/ don't think that, but the way you worded the paragraph above looks like it.

The development of cooking meant early humanoids got more nurrishsment from less food. That was one of the steps on the path of the development of more sophisticated societies, technology, and bigger brains. It was an important step, but not the only one.

The wording you wrote suggests some early humanoids were discussing the problem of how to keep their massive brains fed, and decided to invent cooking as a solution. I don't think that's what you meant to imply.

So far. They've still go another billion years before the sun evolves far enough to make it necessary for them to find a new planet.

So far.

But big cats are more sensitive because they collect more photons in a way that reduces their visual acuity.

No. Not SO BAD, just it has some imperfections. Who is fabricating stuff now?

That sentance does not make sense. Worse? The final result is pretty good - the point is it could be better. There are lots like that in nature.

As I said elsewhere - this is like trying to argue with flat earthers.

Now you are just trolling.

If you are as well read on the subject as you have claimed and still come out with such absolute rubbish, then your comprehension skills are really poor.

I genuinely believe you do not know what those are.

True. Whoever developed cooking could afford to evolve a larger brain (along with the larger body).

We've absolutely no idea which came first, and both probably evolved together as the bigger brain allowed more skillful cooking, which made the bigger brain less likely to starve the bulkier end of the population when food was in short supply.

It's not so much a mistake as a sketched out argument.

It you read the paper you'd have got a much more careful - but longer argument.

It's obviously a mere sketch of the argument.

Perhaps. The fact they got it faster might have been just as importance.

It was a very early one. Fire, cooking, tools and language all seem to have been early and important. Tools break, get discarded and stick around for a million years or so, so they do get more attetnion in the same way that bone and teeth do, and for exactly the same reason.

cooking as a solution. I don't think that's what you meant to imply.

Obviously not. A discussion about inventing a technique which didn't exist at the time would have involved words which wouldn't have been invented then either. They may well have had a word for the squishy stuff inside the skull, but they didn't have a clue what it did, or how much of the food they ate got used up in keeping it going. The formulation was deliberately absurd, and you want to carry on as if it wasn't. Grow up.

Agreed.

The best explanation appears to be in the long message "On 21/03/21 11:13, David Brown wrote:" which, to unfairly summarise it, contains the paragraph Thus if Larkin has had an idea about how life on earth came about, or how the organisms around us now evolved, it must be /true/. He is as convinced of that as a fundamentalist Christian is about what they read in Genesis. The religious fanatic says "it must be true because god said it", Larkin says "it must be true because /I/ said it".

We have some idea. We don't know precisely when cooking started, but our ancestors had bigger brains than related hominids long before the earliest known signs of cooking - and brains continued to increase in size long after we know cooking was established. There was, as you suggest, a co-evolution in both the genetics (the brain size) and the social structures (including cooking).

It was poor wording - no more, no less. As I say, I don't think you misunderstand anything here, you just expressed it poorly on this occasion. It is very easy to do that.

I was talking about your wording, not the paper.

There is no need to get defensive or argumentative about the matter, or try to invent arguments that were not there in order to "win". All you need to say is "yes, it was poorly worded" and move on.

The hyper-Darwinist atheists, as I just said.

That's what I've been saying. It's a very good design.

Note the word "If."

Not me!

I believe that badly functioning organs lose the natural selection competition against better functioning organs. Which implies that our eyes are well-designed, by whatever process did it.

What's wrong with that?

I believe that my eyes are amazingly good and versatile. We didn't evolve to read words or schematics, but we were ready.

Alas, too often human knowledge is just social agreement through peer effect. It's been wrong a lot.

Your giant, childish rant is characteristic of the atheist-Darwinist position that, among other things, insists that our eyes are a badly structured mistake. That is the emotional tail wagging the logical dog. Feelings crushing reason again.

People here are making up elaborate scenarios to explain why evolution created a defective human eye and then gave up. I don't think it did.

I can read 400 WPM. I can hit 12/12 hardballs coming in at 55 MPH. I can look at a schematic and see the signal flow in seconds. Jellyfish can't do that with their dumb eyes.

Eyes made a choice? If I said something like that you would go into hypermock mode.

You might do a little research on all that. The structure of the vertebrate eye may well be optimal, contrary to the expert opinions here. That is consistent with Darwinian evolution and with intelligent design.

There are excellent papers online that explain why our eyes are so good.

It's a serious question. Someone might try to answer it.

Silly insults to avoid addressing the question.

It would only be surprising if eyesight were a major factor in reproductive success. Also, how do you define "supremacy?" If it is duration of existence on Earth, Lichens and cockroaches beat humans, even with their inferior eyesight.

Correct.

robert

Partly by reading up on how the human eye actually works. And noticing that it does.

It's a superb, very complex design. All the pieces work together. Fiberoptics steers the light around the plumbing above. The retina is the most energy-intensive organ in the body and needs a lot of blood flow for fuel and cooling and image pre-processing. Look it up for yourself.

Evolution doesn't optimize in steps?

All of it - the invalid assumption (based on a complete misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection), the logical reasoning (it's not exactly /wrong/ - it is missing entirely), and the conclusion (which is clearly and obviously wrong to anyone who has looked at an eye).

You demonstrate an extraordinarily fixed and determined inability to understand the basics of evolution. It does not seem to matter how often you are told you are wrong, and how often people tell you what /actually/ happens. You build on this by failing to grasp that "some idea you have" is not the same thing as an inescapable conclusion or a logical implication.

All you show is that two wrongs sometimes make an even bigger wrong.

If anything, that ability has come about by accident as a side-effect of how /bad/ human eyes are. If our eyes had been anything like as good as those of many other creatures (/none/ of which are in any sense optimal or perfect), we probably wouldn't have evolved the kind of brain structures needed to read or understand electronics.

Certainly people have got things wrong, and still do. We have a lot better methods now for reducing that risk in science - it's not perfect or infallible, but it is pretty good. And it is immensely better than "Larkin's ideas" as a way of establishing knowledge and understanding.

When the scientists of the world agree on one thing, and /you/ say something else, it is of course conceivable that the scientists are all wrong. It is, however, almost inconceivable (to everyone but you) that /you/ are correct.

There you go again. Larkin has an idea, therefore it must be correct. Larkin is logical, therefore anything and anyone that disagrees with the Larkin idea must be incorrect and illogical.

Evolution hasn't stopped. No one thinks it has. Those who actually understand evolution know that "evolution gave up" doesn't even make sense.

But no "elaborate scenarios" have been suggested or are needed to explain why our eyes are so poor - evolution is a random process, and sometimes things turn out well, sometimes badly.

That is nothing to do with your eyes being good or bad.

That is nothing to do with your eyes being good or bad.

Are you really such a total idiot, or are you just very good at pretending?