Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part Three

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I suppose it’s not as richly detailed as, “God made it that way,” but there are very many scientific observations that have been made with animals in all states of photosensitivity development from which we can draw reasonable inferences.

If I see a bunch of golf balls in a field and say, “Hey. . . looks like someone’s been playing golf here” would you ask for the trajectory of each ball?
 
There was no first animal that had eyesight. There were a progression of individuals that had more and more eye-like features and functions, and it’s an arbitrary matter where exactly along that progression you’d refer to that organism’s visual processing mechanism as “eyesight.”

Take a nice simple example. You are walking on a big rainbow road from red to yellow. You’ll see the redness giving way to orange, and then things start getting pretty yellow. At what exact point do you stop calling it orange and start calling it yellow?

There isn’t a specific point. You don’t say, “No no no nonono. . . YELLOW!”

The same goes for the development of new physical features. You get a light-sensitive patch, then a bump or cup, and so on. You can see that we’re moving toward more complex features, and you can see that the final result is the eye. But there’s no magic moment where no-eye suddenly turns into fully-formed eye.
 
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Less to more complexity? Not a truism. No good evidence. What we can observe today provides good evidence and most things alive today provide ideas and facts about how living things work… How things in the past worked, or didn’t, is not repeatable. More than one inference can be made. I see a bunch of golf balls but they were put there by somebody. Somebody who just dropped a bucket of balls and left them there.

Unguided chance?
 
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Unfortunately the studies listed in that article’s bibliography don’t link to abstracts or papers, and I don’t have a copy of those journals in my possession. But the idea that an apparent weakness turns out to be a necessary feature is certainly worth considering.

Maybe we can dig up more links or articles on this subject?
 
benjamin1973 said:
You get a light-sensitive patch, then a bump or cup, and so on. You can see that we’re moving toward more complex features, and you can see that the final result is the eye. But there’s no magic moment where no-eye suddenly turns into fully-formed eye.
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You are contradicting yourself…could this animal see with just this bump or cup ?
 
Yep, vaguely. But it couldn’t focus or process the visual information very deeply.
 
Yep. In order to respond to light, you need cells capable of a photochemical reaction. You don’t need bumps or cups.
 
I can’t speculate on what an animal might “know.” But if the ability of some of the organism’s cells to respond to light gave it an advantage, then that trait had an increased chance of being passed on to the organism’s descendants.
 
About the production of the eye, let us not forget the Cambrian era Anomalocaris which had at least 16 thousand lenses and possibly twice as many for each eye (having two eyes). This is crazy even compared to modern eyes, for instance a fly might have 3200 lenses each eye.
This is one example of a very early and very complex compound eye.
 
benjamin1973 said:
But if the ability of some of the organism’s cells to respond to light gave it an advantage,
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But, it still had to go through the process of evolving that ability. So working backwards everything must have started out as a Blob, and evolution conveniently added everything it needed.
 
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Techno2000 said:
So, about all this animal could do was know when it was Light or dark in its environment ?
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Yes. Some single celled organisms can do that, they have a light sensitive eye spot. Even flowers that close at night and open during the day can sense light and dark.

You do not need a complete eye to be functional. Our own eyes are not fully functional. An eagle has far better distance vision than we do, while bees can sense the polarization of light, which we cannot.

How do we survive with such incomplete eyes while we wait to evolve the ability to detect polarization?

rossum
 
Techno2000 said:
But, it still had to go through the process of evolving that ability. So working backwards everything must have started out as a Blob, and evolution conveniently added everything it needed.
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Some chemicals react to light. You have seen things that fade if left in the sun too long? That is light reacting with the dyes. All evolution needs is one such photosensitive chemical; once it gets started it can fine tune the chemical to get a faster and more specific reaction to give it an advantage.

rossum
 
rossum said:
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Techno2000:
But, it still had to go through the process of evolving that ability. So working backwards everything must have started out as a Blob, and evolution conveniently added everything it needed.
Click to expand...
Some chemicals react to light. You have seen things that fade if left in the sun too long? That is light reacting with the dyes. All evolution needs is one such photosensitive chemical; once it gets started it can fine tune the chemical to get a faster and more specific reaction to give it an advantage.

rossum
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I thought we were talking about the first evolutionary produced animal …the Fish ?
 
Fish are vertebrates. The first vertebrates appeared a long time after the first life, and a long time after the first very primitive light detectors evolved. Some single-celled organisms have light detectors.

For the first animal (metazoan) you need to look in the Precambrian for the Ediacaran fauna. The Ediacaran was a long time before the first fish.

rossum
 
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