Re: Given religious material while not busking

charliejuggler wrote:

Tim from Leeds wrote:
Please could you explain in lay-man's terms the evidence for evolution
that you've seen? I'm no great scientist, but I've never heard any that
made sense.

One of my favourite examples is the human eye.

It's often argued by creationists that the eye is such a complex organ
that there is no way it could have evolved by natural selection. It can
see in extremes of light and dark, resolve objects centimetres or miles
away, react to sudden motion etc. - it's basically a pretty cool organ.
I'm quite fond of mine even if they're a bit rubbish at focusing and
need the help of contact lenses.

However the eye has a major flaw, which any sensible creator would have
sorted out before it got off the drawing board. The wiring is on the
inside. Yep, all the nerves that carry impulses from the eye's receptors
are on the *inside* of the eyeball. They all gather together to
disappear down a hole in the eyeball to make the optic nerve - this
gives you a blind spot in the middle (you can see this here
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot1.html).

Bit of a cockup really.

C



You've pretty much summarised my knowledge of the eye, so if I miss
something really obvious please feel free to explain it to me.

For starters, that's not evidence for evolution, rather it's (arguably)
against creation. Also, do you have any ideas how it did evolve? As you
say, creationists like using it as an example of something with no benefit
until it's finished evolving, so how did it evolve? (Again, I don't mean
to sound rude or anything, I genuinely want to know what people think.)

You say that a blind spot is such an obvious cockup that the eye couldn't
be designed. As I said I don't know much about eyes, but it seems
perfectly likely that there is a reason for its structure that we simply
don't know. I realise it seems like a cop-out answer but it's been true
for virtually all vestigal organs, and I'm assuming no-one's ever re-wired
an eye and put it back in something living to see how well it works (for
obvious reasons). In a nutshell I don't know why it has such a flaw, but I
wouldn't consider it evidence against it being designed.

Tim

--
----== posted via www.jugglingdb.com ==----
.

Loading