cool book

Yes.

With eyes like ours, they would miss more often. And eye speed is not the only factor determining a hit or miss on prey.

Why do you have such difficulty understanding concepts like "good enough", "good, but not optimal", and "local maximum" ?

The alternative to your belief "humans have perfect eyes" is not "blind" or "terrible eyesight", merely /imperfect/ or /suboptimal/ eyes.

Our eyes work well enough, but they have clear and glaring flaws and could have been much better with certain different characteristics. But those characteristics could not be achieved by evolution - they could only be achieved by jumps or by "intelligent design". They are therefore clear demonstrations that evolution does /not/ make jumps, and does /not/ have an "intelligent designer".

There is no selection advantage in being stubbornly ignorant, and yet here you are.

Only /you/ are discussing how eyes are "designed". The rest of us know they were not designed.

No one has disagreed that our eyes work well in practice - as a result of evolution making multiple small changes, on average leading to improvements over the generations. We disagree that eyes are optimal or a "smart" basic arrangement, because they have obvious flaws and there are other animal eyes that are better in many ways.

To put it crudely, the evolution of our eyes shows that you /can/ polish a turd.

If it is a kind of dreaming, then that's no problem. The way you described it earlier suggested it is unprovoked and while you are wide awake. Then it could well be a problem. What if you see a nice lake instead of the car in front of you? What if the person you now see in front of you isn't actually there?

There are all sorts of reasons for hallucinating. Some are benign, others less so. I would want to know which it was, if it were me.

That's an active and controlled imagination, which is fine.

Migraine auras are an established phenomenon - sometimes harmless, sometimes a risk (as you said). I get occasional migraines, very occasionally with an aura first. I guess I am boringly conventional that way.

Can't believe evolution?

Most people don't.

That is because you lack imagination and don't ever want science to find a solution.

Darwin knew nothing of DNA. It wasn't discovered until much later. Late

Apparently there are some natural dyes that can do it too but the first to observe chromosomes was German biologist Walter Fleming in 1879.

The bootstrap almost certainly started from the most common cosmically abundant simplest amino acids and built up from there. Glycine and alanine look like two obvious candidates.

It may yet be possible to do it in the lab much like Urey Miller did but with additional levels of sophistication. They have observed most of the required ingredients for RNA world now eg.

Quantum mechanics gives this chemistry a real edge over the sort of high permutations that you might compute classically. A lot of the common amino acids have redundant matching on BB* in the decoding table:

However, that is a testable scientific hypothesis even if it is beyond experimentalists grasp to do it in practice right now.

Imperfect vision must be just fine in your world. The central clear foveal region could be incrementally enlarged by evolution, but why bother?

Too bad that you aren't God to do the redesign. You know so much more than whatever defective process created our eyes.

I don't see how optimizing the front end to process the most urgent tasks (motion detection etc.) can be called "stupid" by anyone. Frankly I don't think we are anywhere near good enough to be able to judge the design of lifeforms but looking at them and scratching our heads is what we do all the time because we are curious... by design I suppose :-).

Dimiter

You play endlessly with words. Something caused our eyes to have their complex structure. I think it was evolution, and you don't.

I don't know better, but I read papers by people who do, and they make sense to me. The "eyes are badly designed" arguments sound like smug emotional opinion to me, urban legends.

Did you read my link above? There are lots more that make the point that our eyes are well structured for us.

What do you disagee with in Gurney's paper?

But not enough to be faster than fly! Flies need REALLY good reaction times to avoid being eaten - but they don't have this inverted retinae "design". I wonder why? And if their setup is superior in reaction times, why don't we have that?

Think about this part:

"Evolutionists frequently maintain that the vertebrate retina exhibits a feature which indicates that it was not designed because its organisation appears to be less than ideal."

That's crazy.

I hope you are not suggesting that fly eyes have been optimized for flies. Because that would suggest that human eyes are optimized for humans.

Flies don't read very well.

And we have fly swatters.

John, you are replying for the second time to the same message I wrote. Looks like you understood my point better in your first reply.

And no, I don't think I'd waste my time reading papers which claim their authors know better how we ought to be designed. We have a long way to go to grasp all aspects of our design, and probably a longer way in order to be able to criticize it.

I guess if you cool down a little the thread might become more interesting, there is so much we don't know and so much to explore. We are probably not even scratching the surface.

Dimiter

On Monday, 22 March 2021 at 14:06:51 UTC-7, John Larkin wrote: ...

... Do you mean the gradient from the non-inverted retina to the inverted retina if the non-inverted retina is superior to the inverted one?

If that is what you mean then the speculation is that between those two local optima there is a large valley that can't be crossed by incremental development. There would be negative gradients away from both.

So evolution then improved the vertebrate eyes within that constraint.

The outcome has been very good and nobody is disagreeing about that.

For an individual organism, such as humans, the current result is not necessarily the best for a particular parameter such as visual acuity as can be observed by comparing human eyes with other vertebrates but taken into combination with other organism features may be the best that is achievable.

Other animals as have been mentioned ended up with far worse acuity, but that may also be optimum for that creature and their environment.

Some animals have lost sight altogether, such as blind skinks, but presumably in their particular niche sight does not confer significant advantages. For skinks they have also lost their limbs; another example of seemingly backward evolution but one that pays off for them.

kw

Of course that is a possibility. But it is only a possibility. Usually, when a large number of smart people (like scientists) agree on something, they are far more likely to be correct than the few outlying samples.

Occasionally someone has a radically different idea that no one else has had. Usually, however, the people having crazy ideas are no more than that - crazy. People like you, who believe /they/ have great ideas and think the things no one else can, are almost invariably just pathetic megalomaniacs who can't admit that they don't understand and they've got things wrong.

I have no problem with new ideas - I have ideas like any other creative person, and I learn from others like any other normal person. But you are right - /you/ are not normal. Normal people are able to distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas, worthwhile ideas and pointless ones. Normal people are able to learn from others, and figure out if their ideas are just a crazy thought or if they might potentially mean something. You, on the other hand, are so totally full of yourself that you believe any idea you have must be great, and better than anything else anyone else knows or thinks, simply because the idea came from /you/.

I can't claim to be a particularly social person - but I don't have the kind of repulsive streak of self-righteousness and self-glory that you do. I imagine you have a hard time getting along with most people who are not sycophants, obliged to agree with you because you are the boss, or who have found some specific trick to making conversation with you bearable. I don't expect that you realise this, of course, because that would mean paying attention to other people.

Yes, it applies to any feature or organ. We've talked about inverted retinas because they are an obvious case in the organ that is the prime example for the "intelligent design" gang. If you'd like another well-known example, look up "recurrent laryngeal nerve" - especially in giraffes.

But no, it does not "trash the concept of evolution". It may trash /your/ concept of evolution, but not actual, real evolution as known to science.

No one did that. As usual, you failed to read and failed to understand.

No, not at all - no one said anything of the sort. Again, you read little and understood even less.

Are you spotting a pattern yet? Can you get it through that thick skull of yours why people get frustrated explaining the same thing to you again and again?

The reason you think it's crazy is that you don't know what you are talking about. You probably never will.

The history of science is collective wrongness until bashed by experiment. Of course, there are many non-experimental "sciences" still around.

I have good ideas. Often they are original to me but have been created by someone else before. They are still fun and useful.

You keep accusing me of things I never said or did. Why do you keep doing that?

Mostly I don't care much what other people thing, unless they actually make sense.

That frees me from a lot of peer pressure to not do things.

Normal people are able to distinguish

I don't trust many people to tell me if ideas are crazy. Most people are idea-hostile. A few aren't.

You, on the other hand, are so totally full of yourself that

You are projecting.

I imagine you have a hard time getting along with most people who

Wrong again.

Strangers often appeal to me for help, because I look helpful. I usually help.

I don't expect that you realise this, of course, because that

Only some people. Plenty enough.

Didn't that give you a clue?

My knowledge of biology is not advanced enough for the details. But it sounds like the paper is saying the inverted retina acts like a kind of sunglasses to protect the light-sensitive cells. And it warbles on about anti-oxidants and blood flow, as though there were some benefit in having the cell layers arranged as they are. (There's plenty of benefit in having blood supplies to the light-sensitive cells - but no reason for it to have to come from the front side of the eye.)

If the eye were "designed", and you needed protection layers in front of the light-sensitive cells, you would design it with appropriate filters or light limiting structures on the front side, and the nerves and connections on the back. That way, you get to pick a more appropriate light-limiting device (like an iris) and emergency protection system (like an eyelid), rather than a sub-optimal choice (like a bunch of nerve cells and other stuff).

At best, that article says that the human eye is quite good - something we all know - but gives no justification for why it is not /better/, as it would be with a few obvious modifications. Saying that the blind spot is small and has little effect in practice does not excuse the "intelligent designer" from putting in an unnecessary blind spot in the first place.

Who wrote those others? Other "The Bible is true because it says so - therefore science is wrong, and you should donate lots of money to our church" groups?

What do you mean "that's crazy" ? That paragraph is fair enough - evolutionists /do/ cite the inverted retina as evidence that the eye evolved, and was not designed. And they are right to do so.

And I had a relative who was a Catholic monk. By your twisted "logic", that would make me an expert in theology.

Ironically, perhaps, one of the subjects he taught at his school was science - including evolution. Despite being so convinced in his belief in God that he lived his life totally dedicated to his religion, he understood science, including evolution, far better than you did - and did not feel the need to invoke magic for it all to make sense to him. (I never asked him his opinion on abiogenesis, however.)