3 Nov 2007

Richard Dawkins Evolution of the Eye, Fairy Tale the Blind Watchmaker-Debunked

Charles Darwin wrote: "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree". On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

And the irreducible complexity of the human eye, the flagellum, blood clotting, and a host of other examples revealed that the emperor of 'molecules to man' evolution really has no clothes!

Michael Behe author of Darwin's Black Box said “it’s no accident that the eye resembles a camera, which everybody instantly recognizes as a product someone designed.”

Evolutionists have stooped to outrageously desperate lengths to try and explain away the fact that the eye disproves evolution. One such fanciful attempt is by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker. However, despite the ignorance of most adherents to the religion of evolution, Dawkin's Eye explanation has already been shown to be a blind fantasy.

Here Vij Sodera in his excellent book One Small Speck To Man-The Evolution Myth (Highly Recommended) shows the fallacy of Dawkin's failed attempt to explain away the complexity of the eye:

"There is another problem with the gradualistic origin of the eye, since in the (supposed) ancient scenario where all the organisms were very primitive, all the eyes would have been extremely simple, all the brains would have consisted of nothing more than a few neurones, and all the organisms would have been very slow-moving; so for any particular creature, any small change in either the 'eye', 'brain' or locomotion speed would most likely not have resulted in any significant survival advantage. To make a fair comparison, if any of its characteristics were to improve only a tiny amount, most certainly a blind, deaf, toothless and clawless lion with a poor sense of smell would be unlikely to become a threat to a blind, deaf zebra which also has a poor sense of smell.

But the reader might protest surely having an eye with only 1% of its normal visual acuity is better than being blind, and therefore can confer some advantage over having no eye? And some believe this to be true:

"Vision that is 5 percent as good as yours or mine is very much worth having in comparison with no vision at all. So is 1 per cent vision better than total blindness. And 6 per cent better than 5, 7 per cent better than 6, and so on up the gradual, continuous series." Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p81

Well, 1% certainly is greater than nothing. And 2% is greater than 1% etc. etc. Yet, whilst mathematically this is true, nevertheless we all live in a real world and for practical purposes any difference in visual acuity can only be translated into two groups: the first group having some significant benefit and the other group having no significant benefit. So, in the real world, and regardless of the mathematics - from a leech in a swamp to an ape swinging through the trees - we must ask: would an eye with 55% of normal visual acuity offer significantly more benefit than an eye with only 50% of normal visual acuity?

Imagine two men, both having poor vision, being in the same field as a lion. One man's visual acuity is 50% of normal, and the other is 55% of normal. How will they fare with a lion? Most surely we should not expect the man with (in mathematical terms) the better vision to have any significant chance of survival over the other. So, in this case for practical purposes, 55% is not of any benefit over 50%. But what of the primitive eye? You can perform a simple experiment and easily get the idea of how limited a simple eye is by looking into a misty bathroom mirror. Even a human eye with a human brain to interpret the image will only see a misty nothingness. If the mirror is wiped across just once with the teeth of a comb, even though a proportion of the mist on the mirror has been removed, you will still not be able to distinguish even your face. In fact, your own reflection will not become discernible as a face until a good number of passes have been made with the comb . Simple experiments such as this show conclusively that Dawkin’s confidence in any small change in visual acuity being of some benefit in terms of survival is fallacious: a 1% or even a 5% improvement in a blurred image is in practical terms no improvement at all. And so, a 5% improvement confers no selective advantage.

It must also be noted that we have in this bathroom experiment discussed a human brain interpreting the image seen by a human eye. What Dawkins also fails to consider is that any primitive creature with a simple form of eye will most certainly have no more than a few neurones with which to interpret the image: in other words a 'brain' that is very considerably less able to make sense out of a misty image than a human brain. Thus, starting with a totally misty image, if a human eye with its 200,000 photoreceptors per square millimetre connected to a human brain requires (say) a 15% improvement before it can discern its own face, then a (supposed) primitive ancestor would have required an astronomical improvement in its eyes and ’brain’ before it could have attained any selection advantage over any of its contemporary cousins.

Yet Dawkins insists that:
"Gradual evolution by small steps, each step being lucky but not too lucky, is the solution to the riddle: it is just a restatement of the riddle... There will be times when it is hard to think of what the gradual intermediates may have been. These will be challenges to our ingenuity, but if our ingenuity fails, so much the worse for our ingenuity. It does not constitute evidence that there were no gradual intermediates." Richard Dawkins. River Out of Eden p84

But it does not matter one iota whether or not we can imagine a theoretical series of small stepwise changes that might convert one structure to another. That will get us no closer to proving or disproving the possibility of the change, or more importantly, whether such a change actually occurred. And when he fails to offer any evidence to support his argument, Dawkins resorts to sharing his feelings:

"Is there a continuous series of Xs connecting the modern human eye to a state with no eye at all?...Has there been enough time for enough successive generations? We can't give a precise answer to the number of generations that would be necessary. What we do know is that geological time is awfully long...the number of generations that separate us from our earliest ancestors is certainly measured in the thousands of millions. Given, say, a hundred million Xs, we should be able to construct a plausible series of tiny gradations linking a human eye to just about everything!...My feeling is that provided the difference between neighbouring intermediates in our series leading to the eye is sufficiently small, the necessary mutations are almost bound to be forthcoming. (my bold) Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p78-9.

But this assumes that any hypothetical structural change can be the reflection of a small genetic change, and that any genetic change is, in time, likely to appear. The WYWYWG Principle states that the very mutation that is required or which might be hoped for, for the next evolutionary step, is unlikely to appear...

WYWYWG (What You Want You Won't Get) Principal: "If a number of genes are together essential for the manifestation of a particular structure or characteristic; and if in the absence of any one of those genes the structure or characteristic could not manifest; and since, if the necessary individual genes were to appear, it is likely they would appear haphazardly, and within unrelated lineages that would be separated in both time and space: then that structure or characteristic is likely never to manifest - in any lineage".

...So, if a pinhole camera-type cup was present and if a lens would do very nicely as the next step to improve the efficiency of the eye, any such progression would be implausible.

It is quite clear that Dawkins has convinced himself that he is right. And even though he has merely expressed his feelings and has failed to produce any scientific evidence, he nevertheless has no time for those who might doubt his reasoning and pose the question: 'is it really plausible that thousands of lucky chance mutations happened coincidentally such that all the countless components of the eye evolved in synchrony?' Instead, he deals out the remarkable rebuttal that:

"this remarkable argument is frequently made, presumably because people WANT to believe its conclusion". Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p80.

In fact, Dawkins admits his confusion when he informs his readers that a creature such as nautilus, with its pin-hole type of eye, can exist for millions of years without acquiring any improvement in structure:

"The eye is basically the same shape as ours, but there is no lens and the pupil is just a hole that lets in seawater into the hollow interior of the eye. Actually, Nautilus is a bit of a puzzle... Why, in all the hundreds of millions of years since its ancestors first evolved a pinhole eye, did it never discover the principle of the lens?... The system is crying out for a particular simple change...Is it that the necessary mutations cannot arise... I don't want to believe it" (My bold) Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p85-86.

One moment he rebukes anyone who might even just question the theory of evolution, but then he goes on to convince himself (and tried to slip it past his readers) that it is acceptable for him to ignore important evidence. The denial of evidence has no part to play in science, and it is clear Dawkins arguments are driven by his beliefs and not by facts. Since, as with all living things, it is likely that nautilus cannot be immune to random mutations of its genome, and if the eye of the nautilus has been around for (supposedly) millions of years without evolving into something even slightly more sophisticated, this must mean that nautilus is unable to improve on its pin-hole type eye, or, of course, that it has not been in existence for millions of years. Or both."
Vij Sodera,
One Small Speck To Man-The Evolution Myth (Highly Recommended)

The question of eyes has indeed been solved, God made them that way.

See also: The Seeing Eye Video by Dr David Menton (27 min)