cool book

Thanks for reinforcing my point.

Thanks again!

Ours is referred to as the inverted retina. Google it.

Others here started this particular discussion by referring to our eye as badly designed. I don't think it is.

Evolution.

I mean what Darwin proposed: development through an incremental process of variation and selection. The neo-Darwinists identified the variation mechanism as random mutation.

Do you not accept that?

Yes. Can't you?

The inverted retina is just one of its most obvious failings. But when you can't understand that, I don't expect you to understand anything more. (And that includes the list of faults I posted a while back.)

Your judgement of who is an "expert" has been shown to be seriously defective.

No one - including me - has suggested anything like that. Again, you do not understand how evolution works. You do not understand what other people write. You lack the basic communication skills and imagination to discuss with people, but prefer to listen only to the sound of your own voice.

(I don't believe you are actually absorbing anything at that speed - especially given your renowned inability to understand anything written here.)

People buy reading glasses because our eyes are poor - they require significant muscle effort to compensate for basic structural flaws. As these muscles deteriorate with age, the compensation fails and our eyesight fails.

You need /satisfactory/ eyes to be able to read. If you had the eyes of a hawk, you could read at 400 wpm from a much greater distance. If you had the eyes of a fly, you could get the information at ten times that speed. If you had the eyes of a squid, you could do so throughout your field of view, rather than just using a few degrees in the middle, minus a hole for the retina nerve. If you had the eyes of a mantis shrimp, you could read in polarised light.

Human eyes do well enough. Evolution has made them close to a local maximum, based on the luck of various mutations in the past - but they are very far from optimal, and very far from the best eyes in the animal kingdom.

I thought you said you had good eyes - apparently you can only see in black or white.

I think if you studied some /real/ evolution theory, instead of wasting your time with the idiots and conmen whose books you buy, you would be amazed at how interesting evolution really is.

You'd like the story of how sabre-toothed tigers evolved such long teeth that they couldn't hunt and died out.

You've made it quite clear that you believe in "intelligent design", though you are fuzzy on the details of /who/ or /what/ did the designing. Magic DNA seems to be your preference - DNA that can see into the future, guide its path, aim the selections and mutations towards the features it wants, picks and matches the best parts from previous designs.

That's not what you said. You have said that /better/ eyesight is always a survival advantage over less good eyesight and will therefore be selected by evolution. And that is not how evolution works. You have also said that evolution moves towards /optimal/ organs, and that again is wrong.

Yes, obviously. Didn't "This is utter bollocks" give you a clue?

Myopia (and other sight defects) are a lot more common now than they used to be - precisely because it is no longer as much of a handicap towards passing on your genes down the line. (Being a bit short-sighted might not have been a death sentence for humans for a very long time, but it used to be a be a more significant hinder against getting a mate

- especially for a male.)

The fact that myopia is far more common in the genetic pool of modern westerns (where technological solutions mean it is no hinder) shows yet another defect in the "design" of the eye - the genetic makeup of a good eye is unstable.

I think we are beginning to get to the bottom of things here. The reason you believe in magic DNA is that the dancing pink unicorn told you to do so - and it was so beautiful it couldn't possibly have been wrong.

You read that somewhere? Or did a little voice whisper it in your ear?

You should cut down on the magic mushrooms, and stop licking toads.

They do harm, in some circumstances.

Notice while doing the things you do, that is.

Colour-blind people often don't realise they are colour blind.

Not really. For example 10-20% of people can't/don't fuse the two views into a stereoscopic view.

I know that personally since I come across people that can't see my stereo photos. Frequently they report not being able to play ball games like tennis, since they swing the racquet and miss.

That gives many people headaches, and/or they only use one eye - without realising it.

Either you don't understand or you are trolling - which is it?

Remember you stated...

On 21/03/21 19:37, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: > On Sun, 21 Mar 2021 13:41:26 -0500, John S snipped-for-privacy@invalid.org > wrote: >>> It's great fun to lead people into making increasingly absurd >>> statements. >>

Not at 400wpm, it didn't :)

On Sunday, 21 March 2021 at 15:04:09 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

... Coincidentally the technology of camera sensors we humans design has gone through the required steps to change from a front-illuminated design similar to the human eye to a back-illuminated arrangement more like cephalopod eyes that does offer improvements in performance.

No. It's a superb optical and thermal and signal processing design.

The 'incremental' bit is only appropriate for additive changes, there's variations of additive and subtractive types. The variations are not due to one and only one mechanism, but do have some random character.

Nothing that relies on non-randomness can survive above absoute zero temperature... so, EVERYTHING has some random character.

Insults when the questions are challenging. As usual.

Another urban legend. Why would natural selection favor a trend that starved a creature to death?

Perfectly false. I think it is possible. I estimated 50/50.

It does make sense, if you believe in evolution.

That's one possibility. People do that all the time.

Does it select to make things worse?

No it doesn't. By "minimum" he means optimum - as close to optimal as that structure can get.

Easy. If it is good enough that defective vision isn't what gets most people killed before they can reproduce, there won't be an selection pressure to improve vision

How?

And John Larkin hasn't got a clue how it works

I've been arguing FOR evolution.

Yes, improvements. To make it better.

We finally agree.

Humans are social. Some people make arrows, some shoot arrows.

It isn't, but you can't get to a non-inverted retina from an inverted retina, if the inverted retina works well enough to let you survive until you can reproduce.

They do cite because it really does make nonsense of intelligent design

John Larkin's idea of how evolution might work, which isn't detailed and consequently largely incorrect.