WHY THE EYE REFUTES EVOLUTION
Compiled by Michael T. Griffith
From
Any eye from any animal provides a good example of
the total illogic of evolutionary theory. The human eye is a
subject evolutionists would rather skip:
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.
Who said that? A
struggling, obscure nineteenth-century British scientist. His name? Charles Darwin!
Start with a completely developed, fully
functioning eye (the only kind that has ever been
found!) and work backward a couple of evolutionary steps and you will
see why
He had no choice.
Take away just one of the "evolved" parts
of the eye--let's say the retina--and what do you have? An
organ that can see? Hardly! Subtract the lens, or the cornea. Then put
the retina back. Could the eye see? Never! It must be complete or it won't
function.
By what reasoning or logic, then, would an eyeless
creature begin a hundred-million-year project of forming an eye which would be
of no use to it whatsoever until the hundred million years were over? Did these
microscopic animals think they were developing something that would be
useful after a period of time of which even humans cannot even begin to
conceive? And how many more million years for a fish eye to evolve to be useful
out of water?
From Roger Oakland and Caryl Matrisciana, The Evolution Conspiracy,
The human eye is another remarkable system. As you
are reading this page, light is reflected from the page to your eyes. The light
then passes through an opening in the eye called the pupil. The size of the
opening, and thus the amount of light allowed to pass through the pupil, is
controlled by muscles in the iris. The iris closes down in bright light and
opens up when the light becomes dim. The light then passes through a lens.
Muscles within the eye control the shape of the lens, focusing the image that
you are viewing onto a light-sensitive screenlike retina at the back of the
eyeball. Cells in the retina convert the light energy into an electrical
stimulus which is then transferred to the brain. The brain then records the
information the eye has perceived, and it is stored there for as long as you
live.
A video system, engineered by the design of man,
functions in very much the same way as the eye. . . . No one would ever suggest
that a video system is the product of random processes of chance over millions
of years of time. Yet the eye, which is far more complex, is commonly
attributed to the process of evolution--even though Charles Darwin himself
said, "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."
Often evolutionists will argue that it takes a
series of mutations or mistakes in the genetic code to develop higher orders of
complexity. Given long periods of time and random chance events major changes
can supposedly occur in an organism. But no one has ever been able to explain
how this "hit and miss" process could create complex organs like
lungs, hearts, or kidneys. How would the immune system come into existence
gradually over millions of years of time? It is obvious that creatures with
such highly specialized structures essential for survival could not manage to
exist while these structures and functions were evolving.
From Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin On Trial,
East Sussex,
The more pressing difficulty [of
Stephen Jay Gould asked himself "the excellent
question, What good is 5 percent of an eye?," and
speculated that the first eye parts might have been useful for something other
than sight. Richard Dawkins responded that
An ancient animal with 5 percent of an eye might
indeed have used it for something other than sight, but it seems to me as
likely that it used it for 5 percent vision. . . .
The fallacy in that argument is that "5
percent of any eye" is not the same thing as "5 percent of normal
vision." For an animal to have any useful vision at all, many complex
parts must be working together. Even a complete eye is useless unless it
belongs to a creature with the mental and neural capacity to make use of the
information by doing something that furthers survival or reproduction. What we
have to imagine is a chance mutation that provides this complex capacity all at
once, at a level of utility sufficient to give the creature an advantage in
producing offspring.
Dawkins went on to restate
If the eye evolved at all, it evolved many times.
Ernst Mayr writes that the eye must have evolved independently at least 40
times, a circumstance which suggests to him that "a highly complicated
organ can evolve repeatedly and convergently when advantageous, provided such
evolution is at all probable." But then why did the many primitive eye
forms that are still with us never evolve into more advanced forms? Dawkins
admits to being baffled by the nautilus, which in its hundreds of millions of
years of existence has never evolved a lens for its eye despite having a retina
that is "practically crying out for (this) particular simple change."
From Dr. Alan Hayward (a British physicist), Creation
and Evolution: Rethinking the Evidence from Science and the Bible,
When I first came across the title of a book, Mathematical
Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, I assumed it
was a piece of creationist propaganda. But I could hardly have been more wrong.
It was the proceedings of a high-level international conference, where some of
the world's greatest Darwinists and a number of mathematicians met to discuss
whether Darwinism made mathematical sense.
The mathematicians present were not merely eminent
in their own fields. They were invited because of their specialist knowledge of
biology, many of them having done mathematical research related to one of the
life sciences. Even so, the conference proceedings make rather sad reading. The
two groups seemed unable to find much common ground: instead, they kept
restating their opposing points of view.
A good illustration of this occurs on p. 29. Dr. S.
M. Ulam had just given a paper where he showed, mathematically, that it seemed
virtually impossible for the eye to have evolved in a Darwinian fashion. Now he
was facing a barrage of criticism from the evolutionists. One of these, Sir
Peter Medawar, complained:
I think the way you have treated this is a curious
inversion of what would normally be a scientific process of reasoning. It is,
indeed, a fact that the eye has evolved; and, as Waddington says, the fact that
is had done so shows that this [Ulam's] formulation is, I think, a mistaken
one.
This remark is pure Alice Through
the Looking Glass. Ulam had produced mathematical evidence that the eye
could not have evolved by random mutations and natural selection. Medawar
retorted that it was a fact that the eye had evolved, and therefore Ulam
simply must have got his sums wrong!
The extraordinary thing is that the evolutionist
Medawar even accused Ulam of "a curious inversion of what would
normally be a scientific process of reasoning." Medawar's reaction was
like that of a man who had been standing on his head for so long that he
thought the rest of the world was the wrong way up.
Another prominent evolutionist, Dr. Ernst Mayr, was
equally irrational. He dismissed Ulam's mathematics by saying:
Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will
come out all right. We are comforted by knowing that evolution has occurred.
(Page 30)
"Knowing," indeed!
Throughout the conference this sort of situation
recurred. The Darwinists took as their starting point that their opinion was
fact. "Please don't confuse us with your evidence," was their
entrenched attitude.
Perhaps the most impressive argument of all was
that raised by Professor Murray Eden, of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, on page 9. He pointed out that the human genes contain about a
billion nucleotides. (A nucleotide is the smallest unit of information in our
genes --like a letter in a chemical alphabet. Groups of nucleotides convey
messages to the developing embryo: messages such as "This white rat shall
have pink eyes" or "This child shall be left-handed like its
Dad.") He went on to show that, however you made the calculations, you
ended up with the same conclusion: the length of time life has been on earth
was not nearly long enough for all those nucleotides--all that information--to
have been generated by chance mutations.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael
T. Griffith holds a Master’s degree in Theology from The Catholic Distance
University, a Graduate Certificate in Ancient and Classical History from
American Military University, a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from
Excelsior College, and two Associate in Applied Science degrees from the
Community College of the Air Force. He
also holds an Advanced Certificate of Civil War Studies and a Certificate of
Civil War Studies from