cool book

I call it natural selection. It's crude but mostly works. It does tend to weed out gross mistakes.

Have you read Berlinski? How do you know what he says?

Do you relly think that the human eye is inferior to the invertebrate structure? That it's a mistake?

I might note that humans are not cameras mounted on tripods in well-lighted studios.

Our heads are not mounted on tripods. We run, throw, fight, dance, and defend ourselves from rattlesnakes (which are fast but don't aim very well).

Acquisition and processing speed are as important to survival as static optical resolution. Speed is major piece of the design tradeoff, and makes the physical structure less simplistically obvious. Especially to a programmer.

Please enlighten me and explain why natural selection produced a complex and inferior eye when every eye on the planet was a simpler and better one.

Nobody has so far. They just say it's obvious and I'm stupid.

Saying that would confirm me here as a religious finatic.

There are basically only two

Surely not only two, but our eyes steer light around the frontal overhead, using essentially fiber optics. That has several benefits, optical and thermal and others.

Have an open mind and look it up. Give it a chance.

Not all. And we are not scientific cameras.

You are saying that evolution doesn't work. That you are a mistake.

OK.

Wow. I sure hope you don't design anything (hardware, software, cat scratching posts) with thinking like that. You convert possibility into certainty, the major consequence being exclusion.

Static optical resolution is indeed only a small part of the eye-brain system.

Imagine[1] how much better it would be if we didn't have a blind spot and the brain didn't have to /attempt/ to work around the crappy retina "design".

Perhaps then we wouldn't have all the perception faults illustrated by the optical illusions I referred to.

They have attempted to, without success. It is obvious and you are, in this respect at least, stupid.

Correct: evolution doesn't "work". Evolution happens.

Hawks are vertebrates, with our "wrong, inverted" style retina. As predators, their eyes point forward and they have poor side vision.

I might note that neither squids nor shrimp are dominant species. We are and we eat them. I like fried squid with a light anchovy sauce and Shrimp Remoulade.

No, just a brief full-color still image. They are cool and don't do any harm. Probably other people have these but few will admit it. People have a strong reluctance to seem weird or different. Can't imagine why.

Toads are fine, at a suitable distance. Frog legs, fried or broiled with butter and garlic, can be excellent (in Texas and Paris respectively.)

But I don't like hallucinogens. Don't need them either.

Some of us have developed skills for evaluating the potential interest of information, so that we know in advance if it is worth spending time on an author or not. For Berlinski, we have you to tell us all about him, and encourage us not to read his books. (There are also plenty of reviews of his "work" online, I have seen him talk on a video, and his association with "intelligent design" fanatics speaks volumes.)

I also have not read any book by Dawkins. That is not because I think he writes rubbish like Berlinski, but because there's little to be gained by preaching to the converted - I can find other books to occupy my time.

Calling it a "mistake" implies it evolved for a purpose and failed to meet that purpose. That would be wrong.

But in many ways the human eye is inferior to other eyes found in nature (while also having aspects that are better than many other eyes). The key point, however, is that there a number of features or aspects of the human eye that are clearly poor solutions, and if it had been /designed/, then it would not have been designed the way it was.

You might note that, if you thought it was at all relevant. Personally, I was never in doubt and thus don't need such a note.

No, I won't - for two reasons.

One is that you ask questions that show you are either an absolute moron who cannot understand a word other people write, or you are a malicious liar who twists everything said in order to make it look like other people are writing nonsense. You take your pick as to how we should judge you.

Secondly, as I have explained before (yes, this is ironic), you do not understand explanations anyone writes. If you did, you would not be asking such a question.

People (including me) have explained this and many other things to you. And yes, it is quite obvious once you grasp the fundamentals of evolution (which we have also explained to you).

What conclusion are we to reach, other than that you are stupid? The alternatives are worse, since they imply intentional and malicious behaviour.

The technical term is "prejudice." That saves a lot to time otherwise wasted on thinking.

For Berlinski, we have you to tell us all about

Great. It keeps the prices down on the used-book market.

(There are also plenty of

He's really boring; his books can be reduced to a chapter or less. And his rabid atheism distorts his reasoning.

Natural selection doesn't prefer static optical resolution. It prefers survival.

Yes. But their eyes are much sharper and faster than ours, with better colour vision (including ultraviolet, in at least some species). I can't think off-hand of any ways in which human eyes are better than hawks.

We are not dominant because of our wonderful eyes.

In fact, it seems more likely that the limitations of our eyes meant that growing a larger brain partly to compensate for poor eyes turned out to be an evolutionary line that prospered, with the side-effect of greater intelligence.

Poor eyes and a big brain are a demonstration of what /actually/ happens in evolution, rather than the wild belief that evolution makes individual "perfect" parts.

The alternative explanation is that other people don't talk about having such visions because they don't have them. That sounds simpler to me than some inexplicable strong reluctance to talk about them.

But without insight into people's minds here, I can't say for sure. All I can say is that I /don't/ have such visions, and I would be concerned if I did - I like to be able to trust my senses (to within their limitations). If I had been seeing images that looked real but I knew were not, I would reasonably worry that some of the things I saw that I /thought/ were real, might not have been.

Which might help explain the complex "obviously wrong" structure. Sometimes we need to acquire and react to an image in milliseconds, say the difference between a flower and a cottonmouth. Or a fellow tribesman and an enemy.

We do this with chemical computing elements with prop velocities of meters per second.

Our retina does pre-processing for our brain. Invertebrate eyes are mostly single-pixel senders. It has been suggested that our eye is actually part of our brain because it's not a simple sensor.

Most optical illusions were designed by people to be such. I don't see many in nature. I can't recall a single one. Zebras look like zebras to me.

Not wonderful as much as simply willing. It's a pedestrian suggestion that our eyes are actually better the way they are. That thought outrages the unwilling.

Exactly. No success.

Ever seen a mirage? I have. Was not designed by anyone.

And so you remain stupid.