cool book

Or whales have such poor legs.

Just asking. (Which is a refrain of the fake-news brigade when they are caught out and try to evade responsibility!)

I think he read it - and only managed to compare its /literary/ qualities with, say, Wodehouse or Sayers.

I see no evidence he managed more than that. It requires good imagination to understand the points Dawkins makes.

Evolution doesn't select the most functional organs? It makes them worse?

Interesting theory.

On Sunday, 21 March 2021 at 12:13:59 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

Nobody said it was dysfunctional. That is you adding commentary.

We said it was not an optimal way of achieving the function but it is adequate.

Ok, so it took many evolutionary steps. We are talking about many hundreds of millions of years.

Again please show the evidence that it "defies evolution".

We have explained the possible paths by which it could have happened.

Many of the evolutionary steps are visible either in fossil records or in some cases in currently living organisms.

It seems to be you doing the insulting.

We are discussing it right now but you seem to want to dismiss ideas proposed with no evidence.

kw

Correct. I never said that I was religious, or a creationist, or a believer in intelligent design. I did ask a few questions, and suggest things that might be possible, which provoked a torrent of insults. In a Design group!

Mental rigidity is amazingly powerful. It rules most people.

Because in their close dark world, there is little selection pressure for better eyesight, and eyes do consume a lot of energy and brain cells that have better uses. Obviously.

Humans live in daylight, and need both near and far visual acquity to compete, which is why we have better eyes than mole rats. And better than invertebrates.

That's how evolution works.

On Sunday, 21 March 2021 at 12:17:29 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

Evolution will allow solutions that are not optimal but are adequate.

There are many examples in living creatures where functionality has degenerated or been lost altogether

And one for there is evidence. ...

Four loaves are even better.

Unless there are 2-eyed guys around.

I don't see evolution very often stopping at mediocre, unless a better eye somehow consumes resources better used somewhere.

Our brain has a pretty big visual processing section, which no doubt exists at the expense of other areas. Brains use a lot of energy.

But the inverted retina is more complex and uses a lot more energy than invertebrate eyes. To no advantage?

It's not a bad design. That's an emotion and peer driven urban legend.

Certainly. But I like to see how other people think, or more often refuse to think. That's important in our business, electronic design.

As I have noted, wild ideas are valuable in design. Reflexive rejection of ideas is not.

Insults are one symptom of emotional defense against ideas.

And Berlinski takes that apart. Read him too.

As usual you missed the point. In science one needs more than belief.

Oh, well done.

Now you are not trolling.

Thank you.

Whether it's 'good' depends on the use. I noticed that wild boar are extremely myopic. That's very good for finding food just beyond the end of their snouts, but pretty useless to detect approaching predators. They have excellent hearing and fearsome tusks however, and prospective predators would be wise to stay well clear. As a result, boar survive just fine with very poor eyesight.

Jeroen Belleman

That's because you haven't looked, haven't seen, or haven't understood.

If our eyes were so good, those optical illusions wouldn't exist.

Yup. Shame they have to counteract the crappy eye design, e.g. imperfectly filling in the gap associated with the blind spot.

Or do you think the blind spot is good design?

OK; you can't (or don't want to) recognise suboptimal design that is imperfectly patched up elsewhere in the organism.

Not true. It presumes 'design' and later 'redesign' and refers to a time when some ancestral eye was 'inverted'. Those assumptions being incompatible with evolutionary action, you must specify which of this large set of actors your question is intended to address: [ Judaeo-Christian God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Odin, Cosmic Watchmaker....]

This isn't a serious question it's a LOADED question; the load isn't an explosive, like in a loaded cigar, but it DOES make the question soggy and hard to light.

On 2021-03-21 20:35, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: [...]

To an engineer's mind, the fact that the light-sensitive cells in vertebrate retinas face away from the incoming light, and moreover, have several layers of overlying nerve cells, is somewhat of a shock. There are several obvious disadvantages. Light loss, blind spots and a very limited area of high acuity. Nevertheless, nature found a way to make it work.

I do believe there is good evidence for excellent vision in cephalopods. Their eyes are similar to ours, except that their retina is the right way around, with the wiring behind the light- sensitive cells. So, no blind spot, and no need for a fovea. Much of their behaviour suggests good vision. They even use colour patterns for communication and camouflage.

Jeroen Belleman

People discussing evolution might put displays on the steps of a stairway, of course. Is that what you mean? This leads to the familiar phrases 'descent from', 'ascent from' and can be quite picturesque. But, how does it clarify the origin of species?

Are you ascended from an ape-like ancestor, or descended from one?

Nonsense.

Reflex isn't why we want to reject ideas; pernicious effect and infective growth of bad ideas is a continuing education in the art of rejecting the bad 'uns. John Larkin has a gap in his education.

The surface nerve and blood vessels paths are part of the inverted design. The blind spots do no harm.

I have one eye that has laser-burned blind spots about 20x the usual area. I don't notice. It's amazing how well the brain combines data from two eyes. I also focus at very different distances, and the resulting image is clear all between, and even a bit beyond both ends.

I think it's optimized, because it evolved.