Re: [asa] Origins: Francis Collins and ID

Good questions. While the end product of evolution over 3 billion
years or so may seem quite complex to us, much of this can be
attributed to our ignorance although much of the evolutionary history
is slowly being uncovered.

For instance, there appear to be eyes in many of the intermediate
stages envisioned by evolutionary theory, the question now becomes how
to tie all these stages together.

There are some very good sites on eye evolution with details about
commonalities and differences amongst the various phyla.

PBS has a good overview
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change/grand/
as does Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

and Carl Zimmer http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003603.html

Eyes seem to have a common ground in the Pax-6 gene however there have
been various parallel developments of the eye details since the early
ancestry of the eye's genetic bauplan.

A good but old review paper is "Pax 6: mastering eye morphogenesis and
eye evolution."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=10461206&cmd=showdetailview

Details about lens formation etc are slowly progressing.

What do you see as a problem for evolution here?

On Dec 3, 2007 10:24 AM, Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Hi all, a question I have; maybe you can help me.
>
>
>
> Given that evolution actually happened because of evidence in biology
> (genome evidence), how can evolution explain the complexity of things like
> the eye?
>
>
>
> Francis Collins says the answer is to appreciate the vast amounts of time.
>
>
>
> This still bothers me.
>
>
>
> I'm perplexed because I see both sides. The genome shows proof that
> evolution happened. Yet, using reason, it seems impossible that an
> undirected evolution can create something as complex as the human eye (no
> matter how much time is involved). (I work at Intel in CPU design, and even
> though out CPU's are super complex, it is nothing near as complex as our
> body, DNA, etc.).
>
>
>
> I wonder if the solution is to see evolution as God-directed. DNA is like
> a programming code, God is the programmer, directly manipulating the code.
> It is like intelligently solving the rubic's cube (toy) by one turn at a
> time. Randomly, you could solve a rubic's cube given enough time, but
> intelligence would do it rather quickly. Is this solution contrary to
> science? Is this the point where naturalistic science and God meet? Or am
> I just putting God in there because I can't appreciate the time element of
> evolution? (Some think that nature alone can evolve, and that by God's
> design upfront with the anthropic principle... designing everything upfront
> so it would unravel correctly from a big bang.)
>
>
>
> I would like to know what the other theistic evolutionists have to say on
> this topic.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Dec 3 14:08:12 2007