cool book

That is one of the big points that Larkin totally fails to grasp. Since he believes in "intelligent design", he thinks in terms of designing different bits of organisms separately and combining them together. Thus the "intelligent designer" made the best eyes, the best brain, the best heart, the best appendix, and put them altogether to make the best human. This is, of course, utter bollocks.

No eye is optimal. If you want to contend that, then start by defining what you mean by optimal.

Where do you get the false idea that natural selection produces optimal results?

They are good enough, but other eyes are better.

'Good' is too simple a qualifier anyway. There are lots of parameters to consider. Different animals have eyes with different optimizations, related to their way of life, their ecological niche.

Acuity, colour discrimination, field of view, depth perception, night vision, distance vision, detection of movement, etc., etc. Many animal's eyes are decidedly weird, but probably in some way most useful for the animal that has them. 'Optimal' is probably not the right term. Evolution continues.

Jeroen Belleman

Hallucinations aren't mistakes. They are fun.

Human eyes do a lot more local signal processing than nonvertibrate eyes. That's one reason they need a huge blood supply.

The eye does some motion and line/texture sensing locally, and other things that are, as the scientists like to say, "not fully understood." So it may be premature to call the design defective.

They aren't fun when they don't allow you to avoid dying. And that happens all too often :( See the example I gave above; there are many others.

For that to be worth considering you have to have plausible answers to several points...

Failing plausible answers to those, it is reasonable to describe our eye's "design" as "suboptimal" - i.e. lousy.

On Sunday, 21 March 2021 at 08:36:42 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

That doesn't in any way argue against evolution. All of those features could have been achieved by incremental improvements while at no point losing basic functionality.

Most of the comments about the invertebrate eye being sub-optimal are from the optic system point of view, not the processing although some of the processing is to cover up the problems with the sensor.

The fact that in spite of the limitations of the optics a sophisticated system has evolved does not mean that it was not due to natural selection.

Humans are probably not dependent on their eyes in the same way that other animals are - raptors have extremely good visual acuity; Being able to detect prey when hundreds of feet in the air is good for food gathering and ultimately a reproductive advantage. Humans do not have the same pressure to have such keen eyesight.

For example myopia in humans is a very common malady, presumably it is not a large handicap in survival.

kw

Jeroen said "poor initial choices."

Imagine if I said something like "choices" !

It hasn't been explained. Why would an defective organ result from a mutation followed by evolution against a negative selection gradient?

Why do *all* vertibrates have the inverted retina?

Please explain that.

You can look at an eye and see that is is *obviously* built wrong?

There are experts who disagree. I know that you refuse to read their stuff.

That is in fact my opinion of you. I think our eyes have been improved by evolution, and you think they evolved to become worse.

It does not seem to matter how

Good grief! Why do people buy reading glasses? Or books in braille?

Yikes!

It's great fun to lead people into making increasingly absurd statements.

Of course good eyesight helps a hunter-gatherer to survive. Or a prey animal too. Only survivors reproduce.

I never said that I do. You are fabricating again. That's polite talk for "lying."

I did say that good eyesight is a survival advantage over bad eyesight. Argue with that.

he thinks in terms of designing

Evolution did all that. Do you disagree?

On Sunday, 21 March 2021 at 10:19:09 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

But how good?

What we have is obviously adequate, the extra survival and reproductive advantage for better eyesight presumably wasn't there in humans as it was in raptors and some other animals.

Many organisms have far worse eyesight than us and they survived. By some measures insects are the most successful multi-cellular organisms and they have very limited eyesight by our criteria.

kw

I wonder if humans don't need superior night vision, so optimize on day vision. We have villages and dwellings and fires, to protect us from predators and let us function at night.

Fire changed a lot of things. Cooking sure did.

We are the only species that makes fires. That could be the definition of human.

Mine don't endanger me at all and are great fun. I have poor distance vision (but ideal for reading and designing electronics) and my halluncinations are perfectly in focus and really beautiful.

I've read that something like 30% of people have hallucinations, most often auditory.

Not obvious to me. Our retina uses fiberoptic-like structures to steer light down to the sensors and avoid scattering. Excellent design.

We don't exactly know what invertibrates see, but apparently our vision works better than theirs. Which is why we eat oysters.

Huge blood supply. Good cooling in bright light. Protection of the sensors from thermal and UV damage.

There are good analysies online. You won't read them because they might change your opinions.

Mine work great. The world is beautiful. Sad about yours.

No it isn't - it is actually a silly question. The sort of question someone might ask when they have no understanding. I thought you said you had read the Blind Watchmaker - Dawkins covers the evolution of the eye.

No - just a comment - like many you make :-)

you need more than that.

No he didn't. Now who is making things up?

and you never do that - oh no!

Why have mole rats got such bad eye sight? It looks like their accentors had good eye sight.

Just asking?

So you're just trolling.

On Sunday, 21 March 2021 at 10:19:09 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

...

Well, you do lead by example...