cool book

Critters that see badly survive less often than critters that see well.

That's what natutal selection is all about, statistical survival of variants.

Why do I have to explain things this simple?

Neither are gas molecules, but we can measure Boyle's Law to PPMs.

Evolution does its thing regardless of the words you use to describe it.

Quit being so prissy and think.

Excellent point. Watching the women up close.

On Monday, 22 March 2021 at 20:22:05 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

... I still don't see a negative selection gradient.

As you've admitted all vertebrates use the same basic eye design, so which 'critters' are seeing less well?

It seems to me at that the beginning that there was a level playing field among vertebrates, at least with regards to eyes, so there is no negative gradient.

If it was as simple as "Critters that see badly survive less often than critters that see well" why didn't hawks take over the world. Or cats or any of the other creatures with more acute vision than ours. Or why didn't mole rates die out. They have worse vision than other rodents; they should have survived less often and gone out of existence.

Maybe because it isn't simple, or in many cases obvious what is going to be an advantage in survival.

kw

Compared to..... ?

Only if we include the van der Waals coefficients (which are rather post-Boyle), and there are quite a few regions where they still don't give you part per million accuracy. Boyle lived from 1627 to 1691, and van der Waals from 1837 to 1923).

Getting to that kind of precision is rather more difficult, so you've neatly exposed - once again - your enthusiasm for pontificating from ignorance.

But the weakeness of your grasp of what it does, and how it does it is made painfully obvious from your poor choice of words.

Quit being so convinced of your own capacity to think out the right answer when you don't know enough about what you imagine you are thinking about.

I wasn't aware that gas molecules and Boyles law were rational entities. Thank you for clearing that up.

(Or was there another reason you introduced them w.r.t. rational entities?)

The reason that vertebrates are still around and have their badly designed eyes is that the cephalopods were never far enough ahead to capitalise on their inheritance of innately better designed eyes. It didn't confer a sufficient advantage to wipe the early vertebrates out of the seas. If it had then we would not be around to argue about it.

Possibly this is because in the early days having a brain to interpret vision was a more significant advantage than having better eyesight. Better decisions but made with inferior data.

You don't seem to realise that at the time the which way up the sensor in the eye goes was evolving there were no critters with imaging vision. They had first mover advantage on new territory of seeing their prey. It is invariably the predators that will have the better eyesight.

Because you don't understand evolution!

One of the things that sets humans apart from other animals is our extreme ability to learn from others without having to experience things ourselves. (Some other animals do this a bit, but not nearly as much as humans.) I am prejudiced against reading Berlinski in the same way that I am prejudiced against hitting myself on the thumb with a hammer. Do /you/ have to hit yourself with a hammer to know that it is not likely to be a useful way to spend your time?

I've heard from others that he can be long-winded, which is one of the reasons I haven't bothered reading him. Whether atheism arguments are appropriate or not depends on his target audience - I am not familiar enough with his books to tell that.

This looks a lot like you think inverted retina eyes are better than non-inverted retina eyes, because there are a lot of animals that use them and these are animals you view as "better" or "more successful" than other animals.

The distinction between inverted and non-inverted was basically the result of random mutation back at a time when eyes were so simple and limited that it made no difference. By the time eyes had developed enough for it to make a difference, the jump needed to change would have been far too big for any reasonable likelihood from random mutations. Evolution works as the sum of lots of small steps - jumps are rare, and the bigger the jump, the rarer. Vertebrates have backwards eyes not because they are more efficient than non-inverted eyes, but because we are stuck with them - while other features of vertebrates gave far more positive advantages that outweighed the disadvantage of the backwards retina connection. Small changes gradually improved vertebrate eyes but could not change such a big effect. (And note that "improvement" here has no long-term goals - the improvements early mammals evolved for night vision mean that our modern day vision is not nearly as good as, say, birds.)

When you understand that evolution makes lots of small steps, applies to organisms as a whole and not particular parts of it, and is not controlled or planned - then you will understand that we currently have suboptimal eyes as a result of evolution.

As long as you continue to believe in your fantasies of magic DNA, "intelligent design", and your own personal muddles and mixups of how evolution occurs, then you'll have difficulty understanding anything in this field.

Scientists have no need to "prop up atheism" - it is religious people (including yourself, though you deny it - belief in even the possibility magic DNA and "intelligent design" is religious) who have to try to prop up their fantasy explanations for reality. For scientists, their knowledge and understanding stands or falls on evidence, not dogma.

And do you think that feature depends on the retina being connected on the wrong side, giving poorer sensitivity and a blind spot?

That cuts both ways. Most people believe the local concensus instead of using their own senses and reasoning. That's the majority of people. That results in an emotion-driven group dynamic that can be very, very wrong. Even scientists buy into (and teach) bad theories because of peer pressure.

It makes sense that most people should be that way. It's a stabilizing social effect. We need most people to be grunts who do and believe what they are told. Tribes that are really, really wrong (let's all use rubber arrows!) will be wiped out by tribes that are less wrong, so evolution treks along.

Of course a tribe benefits from having a few crazy thinkers, but only a few. The tribe can adopt the new ideas, or just kill the inventors.

Fads (and even progress) do sometimes happen from novel ideas. I think there is also a boredom factor in the herd mentality that gives us leisure suits and electric turkey knives. The herd still moves together.

I know it hurts because I've done it and it slows down projects. You are hostile to new ideas because you are like most grunts and avoid experience. Ideas hurt you. That's not an insult, it's perfectly normal and socially desirable. I'm not normal, so we don't get along.

This, being a design group, has a slightly enhanced proportion of people who are willing to consider new ideas. And even a few who generate them.

He is endlessly repetitious with just a few naiive ideas. He has said that a major virtue of Darwinism is that "it made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

Do you see the direction there? It's his atheism that's in control of his thinking about the "science." He's another grunt, popular among fellow grunts.

Gosh, what a concept: intellectually fulfilled atheist.

That idea applies to any feature or organ. It trashes the concept of evolution.

Someone cited the appendix as another example of evolution not working. They were wrong about that too.

Think about that. Some small and incrementally harmful step change was made to the eye, so nature doubled down and added many more mistakes until it settled on a complex bad design. A lot of small bad steps got selected for badness. And given the bad design, it won't make any steps to back out of the mess.

Really?

I think that's crazy. I think evolution improved our eyes, because that's what it does, and because they are very good.

In absolute terms. They are wonderful. Maybe you don't see what I see. Maybe the world is dull to you. Maybe your schematics are ugly. Sorry.

Certainly. The central region, where resolution really helps, has less structure to scatter light.

Evolution could incrementally enlarge that clear region to give back our shrimp eyes. But it doesn't.

What is wrong with you? I just said that gas molecules weren't rational. You can only see what you want to see, reality be damned.

So, why /did/ you state that in that context?

Bananas aren't electric, but we can count them.

So why do you believe you know better. The brain's capacity for image processing is not unlimited, the way our eyes work is better than the brain can handle - it can be overloaded visually. Then being aided by the eye design to focus on what is central is anything but a drawback, have you never designed an analog front end to make life easier for the DSP. If you are a shrimp and your brain has not much to do except evade those who are trying to have you for lunch what is advantage for us is a disadvantage to shrimp.

Dimiter

There's lots of good papers on the web that detail the virtues of the vertebrate eye structure. I think they counter the emotion-driven urban legend that our eyes are "badly designed."

Evolution wouldn't give us second-rate vision.

That is one reason that our retinas do local processing, like sensing lines and textures and motion. That speeds up our reaction times.

All very cool.

I think thet we combine high resolution color vision in our central region, and the rest is optimized for local motion and shape sensing in low light, specifically to identify threats or targets for the central region to aim at and evaluate. The heavy blood supply is in that peripherial processing region. That optimizes brain processing too.

You can say

"That's stupid"

or

"Well, here's another idea."