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Investigator: Eye's Silly Design
The Eye Design Problem
Intelligent Design proponents often point to the eye as a sign of design that can be readily seen and understood. For Dembski(1), the match between features of organisms and human technologies shows that design is involved, and in the case of the eye, the comparison is to a camera design, with pinhole opening for light, a lens, and a surface on which to project an image.
They employ various arguments, from "complex specific information" to "irreducibly complex" but these terms are not being adequately defined to provide an objective measurement of these characteristics for comparison. More importantly they don't address some severe failures of ID concepts to explain both the variety of design and the specific usage of these designs.
You often see claims from the ID camp that express certainty that the eye must have been designed. After all, they'll say, how could evolution start with a sightless organism and produce an eye with so many independent parts, such as a retina, which would itself be useless without a lens, or a lens, which would be useless without a retina? The question we raise is: designed for what purpose?
The combination of specific design features of each of the various eyes together with the species where they are found demonstrate the intent of the design. Let's review some of them:
Human:
The human eye has all the necessary components to allow it to gather light, focus it into an image, and process it into recognizable patterns.
But, the retina faces away from the light source, and it is covered by the nerves that convey the impulse from the photoreceptors to the interpretation area of the brain and the veins and arteries that deliver the necessary nutrients to these photoreceptor cells. This is like a clown standing on home plate facing the umpire and holding the bat in front of him, hoping that the pitcher will miss him and hit the bat.
Not only that, but these nerves, veins and arteries all enter and leave the eye near the center of the retina in prime vision territory:
Close your right eye and look at the right side green spot, move in or out and you will find a point where the left side green spot disappears, but the grid is still visible - this is because your brain assumes continuity over the blind spot, but is blind to the reality.
One has to wonder at the cosmic humor of giving the species with probably the biggest ego on the planet an unavoidable blind spot.
But, you ask, is there a better eye?
Octopus:
From What animal has a more sophisticated eye ... (Click):
The octopus eye ... has a cornea, an iris, an accommodating lens, a fluid-filled vitreous humor, a retina, and so forth ... the photoreceptor cells in the cephalopod eye point forwards toward the incoming light ... Cephalopods have a rigid lens of fixed focal length ... change their range of focus by moving the entire lens closer or farther from the retina with the ciliary muscle ... are able to always keep their slit-shaped pupils in a horizontal position ... cephalopods also have polarized vision. The chromatophores and iridescent cells on the skin of cephalopods can create a visual pattern that coincides with polarized light. Octopuses and squid can recognise these light patterns and since the chromatophore patterns change depending on mating season, behaviour, and stress, they can effectively communicate with each other. Polarized vision also allows cephalopods to detect otherwise transparent prey such as jellyfish and ctenophores.
Note that all human designs that use lenses and means to capture the light in images or data points involve a fixed focus lens and some means of moving the lens or the receptor field to bring the objects into focus and that in all such cases the field between the lens and the receptor is kept as free from other objects is (humanly) as possible. This is evidence of good design practice refining the efforts of previous designs. Remember that camera example as used by Dembski?
The irony here is that this better design is given to a creature that lives at the bottom of the ocean, participates in psychedelic light shows, bizarre mating rituals and a complete disregard for civilized life as we know it.
Can anything be sillier?
Copepod:
This is a little critter that (shown here as a larvae) has a single eye and a single photoreceptor ... and yet it has a lens.
Why would it have a lens with only one photoreceptor (that is basically an on\off signal processor)? Because the photoreceptor is at the end of a little stalk that can move back and forth and up and down, covering the area that a more complete retina would cover with this single sensor. The stalk dances for the light.
Copepods are predators and use this dancing eye to build up a picture of their surroundings in much the same way that a laser light show can produce an image with one dancing light, or a television can produce an image with a dancing beam (of course both examples are commonly used to expand the intelligence of their viewers ... or is it just for silly entertainment?).
Bug-Eyed!
There are critters with one eye, and critters with two. Snakes have infra-red sensing patches in addition to their eyes. Some spiders have eight (one for each leg?). Some scallops have over a hundred eyes, and one has to wonder if some cosmic designer said "So ya want to see, and a hundred eyes isn't good enough for you ... how about a thousand eh?" And almost covered the entire heads of some insects with little beady eyes.
Integrate that!
Anything else unusual in the eye department?
Four-Eyed Fish?
Try the Anableps minnow, a fish about 4 inches long from South and Central America and that feeds on aerial and aquatic prey. This eye is bifurcated with one half dedicated to looking up at the aerial prey and one half looking down at the aquatic prey simultaneously.
There are two different areas of the retina and different curvature of the lens to accommodate these different views.
Looks like Ben Franklin was not the first to invent the bifocal glasses ... and speaking of glasses, why is it that most humans need optical assistance to read the words that they themselves write?
So, is it Silly or Intelligent?
Assuming that design by some outside Force or Entity is involved in the development of eyes of all the different species on earth, is this a better example of Silly Design Theory or Intelligent Design Theory?
Let's check the Silly Index:
Pegged
After all, they'll say, how could evolution start with a sightless organism and produce an eye with so many independent parts, such as a retina, which would itself be useless without a lens, or a lens, which would be useless without a retina? Isn't that a silly argument?
(1) Dembski has also claimed that not all things need to have been designed. This is his answer when he confronted with questions like "how does the scrotum exhibit good design" (as he was asked on the "Schmevolution Panel" Discussion on the Dailey Show by Jon Stewart Sept 15, 2005), when the obvious answer is that this is a Silly Design feature: look at all the film clip on "America's Funniest Home Videos" that end up with {object} striking {scrotum}. The Cosmic Imp must be hooting eh?
