>
> Anyway, I wanted to hear reaction to the quote along two lines:
>
> 1) Is this information still accepted? Things might have changed since 1979.
> Are there other books that look at the evolution of the eye in more detail?
Truth and Fact unlike science does not need to change. Many of the posts
are so vague and filled with scientific sounding garbage void of common
sense I just bite my fingers and let it slide. But this one I do know a
little about. And before anyone asks "No" I do not have a Phd!
If a fish swimming in a pond gets it's face bit off up to it's eyeballs
that could be understood as random evolution. Bits fish hanging out of
it's gills yet still alive. Now how long will it take for the fish to grow
another mouth?
The eye, most animals have at least two is a vastly more complex
question to ponder.
"While it is easy to accept that a random search might hit on mutational
routes leading to relatively trivial sorts of adaptive ends, such as the
best coloration for a stoat or ptarmigan or the most efficient beak forms
for each of the different species of Galapagos finch. But as to whether
the same blind undirected search mechanism could have discovered the
mutational routes to very complex and ingenious adaptations such as the
vertebrate camera eye, the feather, the organ of corti or the mammalian
kedney is altogether another question. To common sense it seems incredible
to attribute such ends to random search mechanisms, known by experience to
be incapable, at least in finite time, of achieving even teh simplest of
ends. Darwin himself was often prone to self doubt over teh sheer enormity
of his own claims:
Although the belief that an organ so perfect as the eye could have been
formed by natural selection, is enough to stagger any one... I have flet
the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at others hesitating to
extend the principle of natural selection to so startling a length.
The only way Darwin could have countered these doubts would have been by
the provision of rigorous quantitative evidence in the form of probability
estimates to show that the routes to such seemingly remarkable ends could
have been found by chance in the time available. To have estimated the
probability that a purely random search would have discovered the route
(or routes) to the eye, for example, he would have needed to have mapped
out all possible routes that evolution might conceivably have taken from
the original light sensitive spot over the past three thousand million
years adn then to have determined the fraction of routes which lead to
"camera type" eyes adn the fraction which lead to all other less
sophisticated organs of sight. Only then would he have been able to
counter his critics with quantitative evidence that such seemingly
improbable ends could have been hit on by chance."
Michael Denton Evolution a theory in crisis
The human eye is so much more complex than the camera yet 25 years of
education says that if you find a camera in the wilderness (or a
hasselblad) on the moon only the greatest illogical and indoctrinated
faith would imagine evolution without a designer. Even Hasselblad's cannot
fix themselves. For that matter very few camera repair people can either.
Randy Landrum
B.A. Brooks Institute
Santa Barbara California