Brilliant
Creation 22: The Four Gigabaud Eye
"Only trivial
questions have answers. Profound
questions lead on to other questions." -
Sydney Harris
A question once bothered me for a long time. Why, if mutations happen slowly, randomly,
and discretely with respect to both geography and species, are there no
one-eyed creatures anywhere in the world?
There are no one-eyed insects. No
one-eyed reptiles. No one-eyed fish. No series of one-eyed fossils evolving into
two-eyed fossils. Nothing developed a
single eye symmetrically above its nose or just on one side of its head, for
that matter. Even mammals such as bats
and moles - mammals near the top of the evolutionary tree - blind, or nearly
so, have two eyes. There are countless
books illustrating the evolutionary "series" of miniature horses
becoming big horse[1]s. But there is no fossil series anywhere on Earth
of a no-eyed or one-eyed creature ultimately developing binocular vision
through some evolutionary process.
A college biology professor specializing in evolution
answered the question I posed to him, "Why are there no one-eyed
creatures?" with this response:
"Two eyes are better."
So, my friend is a new Lexus with better transportation than an
oxcart. Yet the ancient Romans used the
latter and could only give the former its name, and posthumously at that.
The first light-sensitive spot to "evolve" on any
organism could not have possibly anticipated the distance measuring capacity
that would someday be afforded only by stereoscopic vision (two eyes), any more
than Julius Caesar could have ordered that a stretch Lexus be built for his
comfortable transportation. Just as a
Lexus is "better" than an oxcart, so too is a pair of eyes
"better" than only one eye.
But some people in Asia, Africa, and Europe still use oxcarts even today
rather than trucks. Many species of
animals survive without eyes or with extremely poor eyesight, but no animal
ever used a single eye. We have
billions of fossils. None of them has
only one eye. Nor, in fact, do any of
them have half-eyes, as must be expected somewhere in the very lengthy, slow,
stepwise progression of eye evolution.
What is the probability that in every single evolutionary
sequence that led to vision, two[2] identical light-sensitive
spots developed? One sensitive light
spot never progressed, only two. It is more than strange. It is, to me, inconceivable. Light is light, isn't it? Two light-sensitive spots would seem to
confer no advantage over one in terms of simple light detection.
IF eyes had evolved, then whatever stimulated the skin into
developing the first such "light-sensitive spot" must have done so
simultaneously in two separate places, in perfect bilateral symmetry about the
body's axis. Thirty-eight different times,
according to experts, along thirty-eight separate evolutionary branches of eye
development. Why must these eye
precursors have been symmetrical about your and every other animal's body axes
of symmetry? The pseudoscientific
answer: Two eyes are better than one.13
We often accept poor answers, such as that offered by the
professor, to good questions. May I
suggest that an unsatisfactory answer is often worse than none at all? A poor response can mislead like nothing
(literally) else can. Perhaps some of
the answers I have given are poor. My
greater goal than the avoidance of unsatisfactory answers is to ask good
questions - challenging questions and those of such a nature that has not been
widely considered and debated, at least to my knowledge.
Dr. Barbara Sakitt of Stanford University has demonstrated
that the human eye can detect a single quantum of light, the smallest amount of
energy known. Remember my earlier
remarks on biological efficiency? A
single quantum of light is about as challenging to generate as it is to detect
discretely. Yet, the human eye
accomplishes this extraordinary feat of detection. A quantum is a very extreme physical
value. Similarly, the scientific
findings are profound. Such information,
and its tremendous implications for the Brilliance of our Creation, has
heretofore been unknowable. The response
from many scientists could be as succinct as:
"Ain't evolution grand."
Sure it is. Evolution is grand, even if it consists of nothing more than
adaptation, which is precisely the case.
3 Some animals, such as sea scallops, have numerous rudimentary "eyes." Some spiders have four to eight eyes. But the vast majority of animals have two symmetrical eyes.
But Darwinian Evolution cannot begin to explain biological sophistication, efficiency, redundancy, and joy, much less non-biological Profound Fortuitous Interdependencies which integrate so flawlessly, so brilliantly with biological ones.
Let me pose another human/computer comparison. It seems to me to be another piece of robust evidence in support of brilliant design, rather than random happenstance.
The early state-of-the-art personal computers had a 56K internal modem, i.e., they could transmit about 56,000 bits per second over telephone wires while accessing the internet or other information sources. Your eyes transmit information to your brain at the rate of 4,000,000,000 bits per second – 71,428 times as fast as those early computers, which were sophisticated designs, by the way. This is the power of human electrochemical optics. And we are to believe that DNA just happened to drop into "the" sequence which produced such a complex system, together with even more great hardware at either end!
Reconfiguring the optic nerve to a transmission rate similar to that of most internal modems in use today would prevent most of our physical activities. Our eyesight would be jerky and freeze-framed. The world would continue on like the picture in our mind formed as slowly as it does during a computer download or the development of a Polaroid photograph.
If the development of mechanical fiberoptic communications was
so difficult to build at the end of the twentieth century, how could it have
evolved with even greater elegance prior to the dawn of human history? Is it possible that nature arranged and
coordinated: (1) the coherence of electromagnetic radiation in what we
recognize as the visible spectrum, (2) invisible air, (3) invisible liquid (the vitreous), (4)
invisible solids (the cornea, contact lenses, glasses), (5) a converting and
encoding mechanism (retina), (6) the optic nerve, (7) light in a different
form, able to travel inside a nerve and yet maintain all of the data
perfectly, and finally, (8) a decoding system within the brain? Each of these factors of sight is an absolute
necessity, without which no animal could see.
Each seamlessly integrates with and compliments all of the others. You design an eye sometimes from scratch that
will fit inside the skull of a mouse, or a hummingbird, or a spider. Do that for practice.
Then when you've finished that one, design a better one for
humans with color vision so that everyone can enjoy sunsets.
Only Nature’s God, cited in America’s Declaration of Independence, could produce invisible matter in each of the three (common) phases - gas, liquid, and solid. Similarly, only Nature’s God could give us electromagnetic radiation, a form of energy so brilliant that its amplitude and frequency are adjustable enough to carry prodigious amounts of information. Only Nature’s God provided for images - rays of light - to be carried inside our bodies to our brains.
This transmogrification of a light image to precise, coherent, electrical impulse does not take place outside of intelligent life or our mechanical creations, e.g., cameras.
These features of light, such as the capacity to carry even
telephone conversations, have been an inherent part of light since the
beginning of time; they're waiting for modern man to discover and exploit for
his benefit.
Light can be intimately related to hearing. How can this be? What has light to do with
sound? Photons of light can carry sound
via biological fiber optics so that the ear can analyze it in a phenomenal
fashion. Let's examine what that means.
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