cool book

Evolution can only proceed in small steps. There's no series of small steps that can put blood supply and the nerves cells behind the light sensors when they start off in front. The eye is presumably as well-designed as it can get to be within that constraint.

Wrong. The eye is very well-structured, for an eye where the blood supply and the nerve cells that serve the light-sensing cells are in front of the light sensing cells. That's a weakness of the design, and the cephalopod eye doesn't have that problem. Unfortunately evolution doesn't have a rip-it-up and start over option.

Your emotional reaction has blinded you to what is being said. One design feature of the human eye is sub-optimal. It is an imperfectly structured organ, but it is close to optimal in most other respects.

It didn't create a defective eye. It merely created one that could have been better if the process had started off from a different initial structure.

Nor do they need to.

Poor wording. The issue is what the evolutionary process started off with, which was presumably a patch of light-sensitive cells, which were useful because if there wasn't any light, any predator with eyes couldn't see the organism and eat it.

It is a poor choice of words. The structure of the initial light sensitive patch determined how it would get elaborated into an eye.

But it isn't. There are features that make it work better than it might have, but they'd probably be even more helpful in a cephalopod eye.

But not perfect.

And it would work even better if the blood supply and the nerve cells were behind the light sensing cells, rather than in front of them. You probably wouldn't need the "fibre optics" at all.

But since John Larkin doesn't seem to have a clue how evolution works, he been arguing for a rather bizarre kind of evolution.

Not really.

And, considering the fossil record is perhaps a trillionth of all the creatures that lived since life started (and we've found perhaps

Arguing with a religious fanatic is pointless. They see us as fanatics and we see them as the same. Both sides have rationalized many of their arguments until they can't see or hear evidence that doesn't fit.

I don't claim to be any better, I just suspect that I may be irrational in some of my thinking and so attempt to listen from time to time to see if I am missing anything that might actually make sense - to me.

So far, the God argument has no sway. It's turtles all the way down either with a God in charge - or without. So why add something (a god) that is not disprovable?

John :-#)#

Who here is making a God argument? Certainly not me. I've been arguing on the side of evolution, specifically natural selection.

Not exactly. He's doing all the squawling, and I'm pressing his buttons from time to time.

But you opened this thread by touting a book that you should realised was creationist propaganda, and your ideas about how evolution might have worked have been bizarre to the point that it has become clear that you don't have a clue about it.

You're changing contexts. The discussion was about the eyesight of vertebrae vs invertebrae, not within only hunters/gatherers. Of course, within the same species, a hunter/gatherer with better eyesight will reproductively prevail over his peers with inferioir eyesight. Therefore, within that species, evolution will favor better eyesight up to the point (and no further) where it doesn't make a difference any more.

My wife and I have been myopic since childhood. We couldn't last a week without glasses. A propoes reproductive success, we have three kids. There you go. If smartphone dating apps will further reproduction, the human retina will evolve into a 16:9 portrait rectangular shape.

robert

No, you have not. You /claim/ to be arguing for evolution, but you don't know what that means. You have actually been arguing for magic (called "god" by most people). But I can see how you have got that wrong - after all, you have got almost everything else in this thread wrong. You don't understand what others here say, you don't understand what Darwin said, what Dawkins says, what Berlinski says, or anyone else. It comes as no surprise that you don't understand what you are saying yourself.

This isn't guaranteed. If the hunter/gatherer involved is funnier or a better cook or in some way other superior to the creep with better eyesight, he will have more reproductive success.

Competition takes places in lots of different places, and in lots of different ways.

doesn't make a difference any more.

Or doesn't make as much difference as whatever it is that does make the most difference to reproductive success in at that particular time, in that particular society. If John Larkin is anything to go by, flattery may be crucial area of competition in current US society. Sycophants will breed like rabbits.

Probably not.

No one has said it is not /good/ - merely that it is very far from optimal, and has some major obvious flaws. And if you can't see that, you either haven't looked at how the eye is built up, you haven't understood the basics of how it works, or you have got yourself so obsessed with the misinformation you read that you can no longer see what is in front of you. I don't know what hope is left for you, no matter what the explanation for your absurd denial of reality.

There is a limit to how often people are willing to try to explain the basics to you. What is the point in answering your questions when you ignore the answers then ask the same things the next day?

Find a somewhat nerdy ten year old from a part of your country where the schoolteachers don't believe Adam herded dinosaurs, and ask him or her to explain evolution to you.

/I/ know how that can happen - as do scientists who study evolution and palaeontology, and any "lay scientists" who are interested in the field. (Of course the relevance to the extinction to any particular one of the many sabre-toothed species is speculation.) We also know how this sort of thing (natural selection leading to the extinction of a species) still goes on, and scientists have seen it happening with modern species dying out.

Should I bother explaining it to you? No, that would be a waste of time.

I forgot to explicitly state "all else being equal." Otherwise this discussion is moot.

robert

If you think it is possible, you believe in it. Those of us with rational minds and a scientific outlook know it is not possible. It is a 100/0 split in favour of abiogenesis and /real/ evolution.

At best, you could argue that you only believe "intelligent design" /might/ have happened, rather than /did/ happen. That still doesn't fit with most of what you write, and it still means it is correct and fair to say that you believe in "intelligent design".

No, it does not - at least not for those of us who know what the word "evolution" means. In your humpty-dumpty world of made-up meanings for well-established terms, who knows what might make sense?

DNA is not "people". No, it is not a possibility for real DNA - or real evolution. It is only a possibility for magic or gods (alternatively known as "intelligent design").

There we go again - you think in black-or-white. (Well, perhaps "think" is too strong a word for what you do.) Widen your horizons, learn a little of the real world, use your imagination, apply a little logic.

As usual, you are misunderstanding the terms.

We have an "inverted retina" in the sense that the nerve connection is on the wrong side (the suboptimal side, the "works but could be better" side). You can also say we have an "inverted retina" in that the picture is formed upside down.

But it is a mistake - one you have made that adds to your confusion - to think it started the other way and changed. There was not a point in our evolutionary past in which the nerve was connected to the right side, then there was a sudden jump (an "inversion") to the other side and a poorer eye.

No one thinks the eye was "badly designed" - we know it was not designed at all. But it is obvious to anyone who looks that it is a suboptimal solution - at best, a local maximum. Any "designer" handing in the human eye for a class project would get a C+ and be told to look at squid eyes, hawk eyes, and mantis shrimp eyes for better ideas for next term.

Nature flipped a coin if you prefer. There are basically only two solutions for the retina of the eye. Plumbing and wiring in front obscuring the sensors or behind them where it clearly ought to be.

All research grade scientific cameras use the latter configuration and are diffraction limited because *they* really do have intelligent designers!

If the "designer" of the human eye was assessed for a final year university project they would be lucky to scrape a low 2.1 grade.

You parrot the creationist tosh that the books you have read tell you is the truth and have no understanding of science or the scientific method.

Written by creationists for creationists. Your God of the gaps is on a very sticky wicket. The human eye is nothing like optimal. It is merely good enough for the task that it needs to perform.

You might reasonably expect an omniscient omnipotent being to be able to find the global optimum solution for an eye if they were intelligent. It is a basic choice of two architectures. Why settle for second best?

Perhaps one day cephalopods will inherit the Earth...

That kind of thing is very rare, I believe, and is usually in connection with serious issues (like narcolepsy, brain damage or psychological problems). If I had hallucinations like that, I'd want to know the cause.

(I'm assuming you are not just talking about vivid dreaming when half-awake.)

That kind of thing will always depend on exactly how questions are framed. "Hallucination" is not really a well-defined concept - certainly not well enough defined for most people to be able to answer a survey accurately. Participants would need to be actively interviewed by researchers in order to distinguish true "voices in my head" from "I thought I heard a noise downstairs".

I must be a "drag" because I don't like toads? Or because I don't see things that aren't there, or because I distinguish between reality and fantasy?

Thank you for putting it so well and pointing out a possible cause "emotional reaction" - to JL difficulty with understanding the modern science that accounts for Evolution through selection.

The history of the structure of the eye in the argument from design is an interesting back and forth.

William Paley et al claim the the perfection of the eye shows there was indeed a devine designer, even Darwin was worried by this argument, as he could not see how the ey could evolve. As a good scientist he left that for future generations.

More detailed elucidation of the structure, showed that maybe it wasn't so "perfect" after all, and the the slight imperfections show the contingent evolutionary history of the eye.

Now we see the comeback - obviously there are not imperfections, they are there for a reason, and the eye is perfect after all!

That is fine as far as it goes. If you can muster up the evidence on both sides people can then argue about the validity or otherwise of the evidence.

My problem is that the ID people can argue the eye, or the flagellum or one or two other specific cases, but that is all that is - cherry picking - while biologists in the lab and out in the field are daily measuring/observing and writing up new work where Darwinian evolution provides the best unifying explanation for what is happenning.

The scales are tipped in one way only.