Danpech

When the information about some organ is observed with no thought of a designer God, and thus that no designer-claim need be opposed by interpreting the evidence in a way that opposes the designer-claim, then the evidence would be seen to prove...what? The human eye can as well be seen as the optimal result of RM&NS (given the requirements of environment) as it can be seen as sub-optimal (by an interpretive mindset that considers the evidence apart from all environments).

Amaleq13

I suspect this thread will be moved from BC&H soon but, before you go, your title is mistaken. Evolution says the human eye developed gradually to its current complexity. In evolution, "optimal" is whatever allows one to procreate before dying. The eye works pretty well for the most part but I think common experience shows that it doesn't work "optimally" for most people. At least I see a lot of people of all ages wearing glasses when I look around.

As an "intelligently designed" structure, the Designer apparently doesn't care for the idea of old people being able to see well since the eye is "designed" to lose its shape over time and, as a result, become significantly less efficient.

Steven Carr

Whose eyes are optimally designed?

Why do some people wear glasses?

And why don't my split-screen and zoom functions work anymore?

Sarpedon

Why do our eyes have blind spots? Why isn't the fluid in our eyeball perfectly clear? Why does the blood vessel that feeds the retina obscure part of the field of vision. Is this the best a "perfect being" can design?

Dr Rick

Anyone wearing corrective lenses to read this thread is good evidence that the eye is not optimally designed.

Postcard73

I wear glasses, but I think ID would get more discussion in the E/C forum...

Scott (Postcard73)
BC&H Moderator

jonatha

Nobody appears to have yet mentioned that the photosensitive portions of the cells in the retina are on the end of the cell that points *away* from the lens (i.e., the light we sense has to penetrate the entire cell body before being perceived).

I believe I read somewhere that squid eyeballs (an example of parallel evolution) do not have this feature. Therefore God is a mollusk...

Doubting Didymus

I think I see where you're going. You're saying that if we forget about the whole designer thing for a bit, we can say that the eye is the best we can expect from RM&NS. Possible, but we could definitely point to things that could have been better made, perhaps if the evolutionary pathway had worked with fewer contingencies. We could point to better outcomes from other evolutionary lines as well.

Chiron

Afaik, the long and the short of it is that evolution doesn't care about something after it's good enough. Take eyesight, for example: does having an eye that can resolve details the size of a millimeter from 40 meters away really help that individual reproduce?

If the individual is a human, probably not, because we don't need to have that kind of visual acuity in order to obtain food and other survival necessities, so this sort of trait would spread only as well as the other traits the human possesses.

But an eagle or another raptor probably would be at an advantage if it had eyes that were 20% (or 200%) better than all the other birds, because extra clarity is somewhat proportional to extra food for birds of prey, and hence more reproductive success.

That sound good?
Chiron

Oolon Colluphid

Not only that. It results in the blind spot (as already mentioned). I used to think that that was the daftest part of the design, but I’ve moved on recently to pointing out that having all the ‘wires’ facing the incoming light has a couple of even more problematic effects.

Firstly, we generally don’t notice the blind spot, because our brains fill in the missing details for us. It seems to me that any design, that requires further design to rectify it, is not good design.

And secondly and more dramatically, the retinal cells are not anchored into their blood supplying tissue by the ‘wiring’, which means that the retina can detach rather easily. I also used to say that a blow to the head would cause this (which it can), but it seems in fact that it more often just detaches spontaneously. This is a Bad Thing™, because the retinal cells then die, making their owner blind.
Correct... specifically, it’s cephalopod molluscs. Their retinas cannot detach anywhere near as easily, as the cells are held into their blood supply by their nerves.

Funny thing is, though, that the nautilus -- the only shelled cephalopod, and hence considered more primitive -- has a similar eye... but no lens. Did the Designer just forget?
Nah, it’s clear that God is a beetle. Probably a million species of them, compared to just one of us Homo sapiens.

Oolon