The first eye

[machaon]

According to the philosophy of evolutionism, the organs of the body arose through chance mutations wherein they were incrementally built up from nothing. We are assured by the evolutionist that this is possible because these mutations were beneficial to the survival of the species and so were "selected for" by Nature. "Each step," says the evolutionist, "adds to the organism's fitness and so leads naturally to the functional organs we see today."

But is this really so? To test this idea, let us consider the eye:

The eye is a marvel of design; it is made of a number of parts -- an enclosed sphere; a field of light receptive cells; a transparent, focusing lens; an iris that adjusts the amount of light let in; a transparent cornea to protect the lens and iris; a system of muscles to move the eye in its socket; and a highly complicated section of the brain to process its signals -- that all work in harmony to allow us to see. And to top it all off, we have two of them! How did it evolve?


The first eye as postulated by evolutionism. How could it have worked? (Illustration by Peggy Miller) Logic dictates that if evolutionism is true and the eye was built incrementally over time from nothing to its present state of functional wholeness, then it must have at some point in the past been only half of an eye.

Only a moment's thought on this supposed ancestral eye lets us see that there would be problems: How would this eye be moved in its socket if it wasn't a smooth spherical shape? What would stop the seepage of light through the top? How would the lens keep from being deformed if it was not held equally on all sides? How would the eye jelly have kept from spilling out of the opened bowl of the half-eye?

And to think you doubted creation. Shame on you.
The full page is here: http://objective.jesussave.us/eye.html


Yes, I will admit that there are valid arguments against evolution. But these are not them. But they are funny.

 

[Clockwood]

First eye: A little light sensitive spot on a worm. It could tell day or night and perhaps tell if a predator or something else passes between it and the sun. Later, multiple spots form right next to each other, allowing the worm to tell what direction a shadow is coming from. A little later still, a clear blister forms over these spots and this focuses light as a lens. It becomes more sensitive and can get a vague outline of the predator once the light sensitive spots concentrate their numbers at the light's focal point. Some creatures even develop muscles to move the whole bilister around and a sheath to protect its fragile surface from damage.

It was done a little at a time for a billion years. This individual is an idiot who has no understanding of the evolutionary theory.

If they want something in favor of creationism, they should look at poison ivy. Dogs can roll in it, deer can eat it, birds can nest in it. Nothing has any sort of reaction to it... except man. Man came from the old world and poison ivy is a new world plant and yet it has a defense tailored specifically against us. I am agnostic, but that is indeed a very odd thing indeed.

 

[Michael]

Yes, I will admit that there are valid arguments against evolution. But these are not them. But they are funny.

And those would be what exactly?

Yes, that eye pic is also funny I will have to keep it as an instant rendition of the creationism argument in any future biology classes I may teach

 

[JohnGalt]

I like it. I'll explain to my science teacher, and wave it around at the church I avoid going to as to support their causes.

 

[Imperfectionist]

Obviously, half a pair of eyes is one eye, not two separate halves. So, before there were pairs of eyes, there were only cyclops.

 

[Michael]

Testing Darwin

Digital organisms that breed thousands of times faster than common bacteria are beginning to shed light on some of the biggest unanswered questions of evolution

This was an interesting article that demonstrates that complexity can arise from random mutation within an evolutionary context. The researchers themselves have been surprised with the sort of algorithms the "virtual organisms" have managed to come up with. As a matter of fact, they introduced a sort of predation program and the little virtual programs were able to figure out ways to sneak around it - tricking the researchers themselves!

Also mentioned was a ditty about how armies of creationists have been going over and over the program to disprove it works - to no avail I think it’s free online?

The Biology of . . . Cryogenics

Wood frogs survive long periods in a deep freeze. Can people do the same?

As far as Ken and Janet Storey are concerned, the most interesting frog is one that doesn’t move or breathe and has no heartbeat or brain activity. In the Storeys’ biochemistry lab at Carleton University in Ottawa, the typical study subject is thrown into an industrial freezer. They call them frogsicles, though they’re partially liquid inside. “Basically, the body turns into a syrupy mass,” Ken Storey says. As far as the frog is concerned, this is nothing out of the ordinary. Like a handful of other creatures, the common wood frog, Rana sylvatica, is a biological conundrum. It spends its winters interned in subzero sleep, its tissues steel-rigid, and revives in the spring raring to go. It’s the Rip van Winkle of the animal world.

This sort of research will, ultimately signal the death knoll of religion, at least as we know it.

I’m not sure how many others have had this sort of experience, but upon telling my Baptist friend (yes I know the Taliban of Xianity) I was atheist, the VERY first question was – well what happens when you die!

Telling isn’t it?!

Just imagine when natural death is no longer compulsory. Bye bye religion.

 

[Michael]

Because this crops up all the time, and I thought Michael Shermer did a good job of explaining it ... well here:

The Fossil Fallacy

Creationists' demand for fossils that represent "missing links" reveals a deep misunderstanding of science

Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." Well over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand "just one transitional fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record.

This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I call the Fossil Fallacy: the belief that a "single fossil"--one bit of data--constitutes proof of a multifarious process or historical sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion.
We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.

One of the finest compilations of evolutionary data and theory since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is Richard Dawkins's magnum opus, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)-- 688 pages of convergent science recounted with literary elegance. Dawkins traces numerous transitional fossils (what he calls "concestors," the last common ancestor shared by a set of species) from Homo sapiens back four billion years to the origin of heredity and the emergence of evolution. No single concestor proves that evolution happened, but together they reveal a majestic story of process over time.

Consider the tale of the dog. With so many breeds of dogs popular for so many thousands of years, one would think there would be an abundance of transitional fossils providing paleontologists with copious data from which to reconstruct their evolutionary ancestry. In fact, according to Jennifer A. Leonard, an evolutionary biologist then at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, "the fossil record from wolves to dogs is pretty sparse." Then how do we know whence dogs evolved? In the November 22, 2002, Science, Leonard and her colleagues report that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from early dog remains "strongly support the hypothesis that ancient American and Eurasian domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray wolves."

In the same issue, molecular biologist Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues note that even though the fossil record is problematic, their study of mtDNA sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs from around the world "points to an origin of the domestic dog in East Asia" about 15,000 years before the present from a single gene pool of wolves.

Finally, anthropologist Brian Hare of Harvard University and his colleagues describe in this same issue the results of a study showing that domestic dogs are more skillful than wolves at using human signals to indicate the location of hidden food. Yet "dogs and wolves do not perform differently in a nonsocial memory task, ruling out the possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all human-guided tasks," they write. Therefore, "dogs' social-communicative skills with humans were acquired during the process of domestication."
No single fossil proves that dogs came from wolves, but archaeological, morphological, genetic and behavioral "fossils" converge to reveal the concestor of all dogs to be the East Asian wolf. The, tale of human evolution is divulged in a similar manner (although here we do have an abundance of fossils), as it is for all concestors in the history of life. We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

 

[Yorda]

Trilobites, which lived on earth some 100 million years ago have pretty advanced eyes...

Nothing is really a chance, everything is controlled by physical laws, which also makes the creation of eyes possible.

Without a deep and strong "will" within "matter" and "energy" to live and to evolve, it is impossible to explain anything. Even a single atom cannot be the result of chance. Too many conditions are necessary for it to be.

Obviously, evolution and complexification can't occur by chance. There's something which draws the universe towards somewhere.

Every motion, every movement in the universe is a means towards peace, towards equilibrium, absence of motion.

Here are two magnets. You see, they try to touch each other. It is not necessary for me to push them to make them move, they move towards one another without consuming energy! Why? Because when they are not united, they are not themselves. They are in contradiction with themselves. They need to become what they are: UNITY, just as we try to become what we are: Unity. Consciousness is dualistic ("me" and the "universe"), unity is absence of consciousness: Nothingness.

Consciousness is only an opposition, moving toward its unification. Without this evolution, without this movement toward your equilibrium, you could not be sentient. Imagine you stop the restlessness of the universe, and you stop every motion in every atom around you. What would remain?

Nothing would remain because matter is only an impression due to apparent motion. Without motion, there's no universe. Nothing. Motion of what? Motion of nothing, in fact, since mind doesn't really move. It is always here and now. But it believes it moves, projected into the future to reach its goal of absolute peace (Nothingness), and restrained by a memory which it doesn't want to lose (universe). All energetic motions in the universe are only psychological ones.

You always try to become one.

Atoms do the same by gathering together into "atomic galaxies". Always associating with "collegues" outside. Later, unification will give rise to LIFE, when external energy (the sun's heat for instance), dilates the atoms (when atoms are dilated enough, particles become capable of revolving around another nucleus in their atomic galaxy, and in other galaxies

Life is a new means of progressing towards unity, since, at a given moment, this progression was stopped by atom's mechanical equilibrium and stability: Particles were obliged to remain at a certain distance from the nuclei. Fluid mechanics allows for new combinations. And life is the same model: a cell is a center (nucleus) and a frontier (cell membrane, outer "electrons" or satellites for atoms). Cells are the vegetable level whereas atoms are the mineral level: The mineral way of life, of evolution.

The mineral way of loving is "gravity". For cells and vegetables, love is almost the same: consumption. Eating the friends around them, or "eating" minerals, to include them within, and become a little more infinite.

Beyond vegetables, you can see how animals love. They are less numerous, they are freer, and there again they feel a little more alone. Their way of loving is sex. This still represents an attempt to include the other, felt to be outside, thus pulled inside to become one, to become the infinite. And so animals continue evolving towards freedom and loneliness.

Then animals give rise to man. Right. What is the difference? The difference is that man is now able to admit he is alone. Animals hate to be alone. They live in herds, following one, and only one, will. And when man becomes a man, he too likes to live in "herds". Particularily for as long as he has not become adult. Teenagers need the unity of a group. Sexuality helps animals to realize that they are alone. Some do. Some people do also.

Loneliness helps man to understand that the surrounding world remains outside, even if he gathers bodies together. Gathering people to have power over them is useless. Making love with everybody is useless too. Eating children is even more useless. Nothing gives peace of mind because there will always be somebody outside to be included. PHYSICAL UNIFICATION DOES NOT PREVENT MENTAL SEPARATION.

All kinds of love, from two-pole points and atoms up till man, have tried to include the outer world, to become bigger. But this is useless. You always feel the same separation. There is always something or someone more to incorporate, to introduce into one's life. Peace is impossible in this way, and man is capable of understanding this.

So one day, man says: "separation is a mental process. I cannot cancel it out by a physical process. Only a mental process can ACHIEVE unity." This means unity can only be made from within. Not outside. RELIGION is born. Now man is a real man.

Thus, man is the mid-point of evolution. He stops searching outside so as to concentrate himself on the SELF, where unity is already accomplished. And now a new kind of evolution starts, a spiritual evolution, which has no end, since the goal is infinite. There is no limit to our evolution. Physical evolution has no end because we always create somebody else to love. This means that THE GOAL OF SEX AND LOVE IS NOT REPRODUCTION: ON THE CONTRARY, REPRODUCTION'S GOAL IS TO HAVE SOMEBODY TO LOVE. Spiritual evolution has no end either because we cannot reach the unreachable. We cannot attain the goal by evolving in time, since the goal is not somewhere in time. The goal is already attained, and has always been attained: it is the present moment.

The nil present moment of infinite Nothingness, which IS, already now. Always. The evolution of consciousness is there to permit it to be, for as long as Nothingness is a necessity, for as long consciousness feels itself to be evolving. In other words : forever. We are doomed to love more and more, to live in higher and higher love, eternally. Isn't that nice?

If spiritual evolution is also never-ending, what is the solution? There is no solution. The only solution is the third option: to stop believing in evolution. There is no actual evolution since all is already accomplished. The upper kingdoms still exist, but feeling infinitely more and more infinite. Angels, Archangels and so on, even Christ, even Melchisedech are still evolving, and feel very, very far from "God". Even when you are in Samadhi, or Nirvana, or ecstasy, or in absolute peace of vacuity, even when you are Buddha or Saï Baba, you feel very, very small, compared to the Absolute. You know that it is impossible to evolve. You know that the only truth is not in trying to evolve, nor in trying to love and love more, it is only in being what we are, where we are, at the time when we are. That is all. If I do so, if I deeply live and accept my life in the present moment, then I am infinite, then I am God, then I am he who does not evolve because he is absolute.

 

[scorpius]

...There is no actual evolution since all is already accomplished.

how then do you explain all those new viruses and superbugs such as aids,asian flu etc etc..
which continously mutate and evolve and adapt to every new medicine doctors/scientists invent/create to kill them?

 

[Yorda]

how then do you explain all those new viruses and superbugs such as aids,asian flu etc etc..
which continously mutate and evolve and adapt to every new medicine doctors/scientists invent/create to kill them?

I was talking about the spiritual evolution of man.

Like said... there is no end to physical evolution (nor for the spiritual)

(......)

 

[scorpius]

According to the philosophy of evolutionism, the organs of the body arose through chance mutations

chance?
I thought it was due to natural selection=survival of the fittest!

The eye is a marvel of design;

is it really?
how many people do you know that need glasses or contact lenses to see?
your Intelligent designer if thats where you going with this wasnt very inteligent was it?

And to think you doubted creation. Shame on you.

I dont doubt creation,
I just KNOW it didnt happen the way your buybull says it did.

see the contradictions
www.skepticsannotatedbible.com

now learn the truth here
www.talkorigins.org

 

[machaon]

And those would be what exactly? Good question Michael. Creation is not the ONLY other option

Panspermia for one. http://www.panspermia.org/

 

[Michael]

And those would be what exactly? Good question Michael. Creation is not the ONLY other option

Panspermia for one. http://www.panspermia.org/

I guess it depends on which Panspermia theory you were to adhere to. For example:

In its strongest version, panspermia holds that intelligent life can only descend from prior intelligent life.

Is really not very different than some of the Creationists arguments. Not to mention as an absolute it’s a conundrum and paradoxical.

There does have to be an original formation of life - somewhere.

As to Pseudo-panspermia:

The delivery of complex organic compounds from space, to give the prebiotic soup some starter ingredients.

Maybe, maybe not.

But, I would like to point out that if life started DEEP within the earth, under the ocean floor, then maybe it’s less likely to be true.

The webpage opens by stating:

There is a widespread sentiment that panspermia is uninteresting because it does not answer fundamental questions about the origin of life.

And I would have to agree.

Life has existed on Earth for Billions of years and that is within the time frame needed for evolution to have produced us. Without the need for extraterrestrial life adding anything to the mix, but it is interesting and who knows, maybe there is life teeming all over the galaxy. That said, there still must be an originator of “life” somewhere in the Universe and this would by necessity be aPanspermia.

And I'd like to point out, it would not have to be intelligent. It could be that there is unintelligent life on planets all over the place and occasionally these get smashed into bits where then toss unintelligent life all over the universe some of which lands here and, well you get the point. But it may also be that life is relatively unique all over the universe. Or that there are no other live planets. Until we have evidence for extra-Earth life - then anything is possible.

 

[machaon]

There is a widespread sentiment that panspermia is uninteresting because it does not answer fundamental questions about the origin of life.

I do not think that neccessarily means life on Earth. It it refering to life in general. Panspermia is, like evolution, a theory. From what I gather, the gist of it is that random mutations alone can not develop such complex organisms as humans. That some genetic material can be deposited from celestial objects. It does not dismiss natural selection. It does not claim to be a theory on the origin of life. Who knows where life originated or why. But it seems very unlikely it was here on Earth. Anyway, right or wrong I think that it is important for people to get out of the habit of assuming that creation is the only option other than evolution. I believe that limits awareness of other valid arguments against evolution that could provide important new ideas. There was a time when people might have very well argued of whether the Earth or the sun was the center of the universe. Imagine if the argument stopped there. The truth could be and probably is stranger than the human brain is physically equipped to know. At any rate I would be surprised if evolution is the whole story. But I certaintly do not believe that creation as depicted by any religion tells any of it.

 

[Silas]

What's with these objective.jesussave.us links I keep seeing? They were only posted today, but they don't work! I just get redirected to www.web100.com, presumably an ISP.

 

[machaon]

What's with these objective.jesussave.us links I keep seeing? They were only posted today, but they don't work! I just get redirected to www.web100.com, presumably an ISP.

Probably a browser hijacker. download Spybot and fix your host file. If you are using MS Explorer add it to your restricted sites. And if you have any anti-spyware stuff update it and run it.