Eye Design and Evolution
There are some people who claim that the human eye must be the product of evolution because if it was designed, the Designer did a poor job. (Ironically, they imply that evolution itself does a poor job of designing things with such statements.) These people do not know what they are talking about. Many of them are Dawkinsites, parroting his uninformed opinions from The Blind Watchmaker.
Dawkins or these other people who think they can suggest better design possibilities for the human eye should check with ophthalmologists. The scientific realities and intricacies are far different than conjectures rooted in ignorance.
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| Dilated by the Ophthalmologist |
Backwardly wired retina?
One of the tired old canards on which antitheists have dined out for years is the claim that our eye is stupidly wired back to front, something no decent designer would use. E.g. the vociferous misotheist and eugenicist Clinton R. Dawkins said in his famous book, The Blind Watchmaker:
‘Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away, from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire sticking out on the side nearest the light. The wire has to travel over the surface of the retina to a point where it dives through a hole in the retina (the so-called ‘blind spot’) to join the optic nerve. This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually, probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer). I don’t know the exact explanation for this strange state of affairs. The relevant period of evolution is so long ago.’Other anticreationists such as Kenneth Miller parrot the same sort of argument . . .
Theology trumps science after all?
For all the cant about creationists using theology rather than science, notice that Dawkins was really using a theological argument rather than a scientific one. I.e. he was claiming that a designer wouldn’t design something like this, rather than scientifically demonstrating evolution . . . After all, he admitted to ignorance of an evolutionary explanation.If I was in your position, I wouldn't bat an eye about reading the rest of "Fibre optics in eye demolish atheistic ‘bad design’ argument", here.