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Old Oct 13, 2007, 07:53 pm   #1815 (permalink) (top)
Jack
formerly Isherwood
 
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Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 13,786
I have no problem at all accepting that nature is able to produce complex and (to us) amazing things. A study of science, particularly biology and evolution, helps in grasping what to the uninformed appears to be magic (created by a mythical god).

People have believed in unicorns and thunder gods longer than they've believed in the Christian god. Are they right, too? The length of time misinformation is accepted as fact does not lend credibility to the misinformation. The length of time that we've understood and studied evolution only speaks to our previous ignorance of natural processes. Evolution was going on even though we had no name for the process and weren't aware of it.

Quote:
The eye is a famous example of a supposedly irreducibly complex structure, due to its many elaborate and interlocking parts, seemingly all dependent upon one another. It is frequently cited by intelligent design and creationism advocates as an example of irreducible complexity. Behe used the "development of the eye problem" as evidence for intelligent design in Darwin's Black Box. Although Behe acknowledged that the evolution of the larger anatomical features of the eye have been well-explained, he claimed that the complexity of the minute biochemical reactions required at a molecular level for light sensitivity still defies explanation. Creationist Jonathan Sarfati has described the eye as evolutionary biologists' "greatest challenge as an example of superb 'irreducible complexity' in God's creation", specifically pointing to the supposed "vast complexity" required for transparency.[41]

In an oft-quoted passage from The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin himself acknowledged the eye's development as a difficulty for his theory, noting that "to suppose that the eye... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree". However, he went on to note that, if gradual evolution of the eye could be shown to be possible, "the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real", and proceeded to roughly map a possible course for evolution through examples from gradually more complex eyes of various species.

Since Darwin's day, the eye's ancestry has become much better understood. Although learning about the construction of ancient eyes through fossil evidence is problematic due to the soft tissues leaving no imprint or remains, genetic and comparative anatomical evidence has increasingly supported the idea of a common ancestry for all eyes.[43][44][45]

As Behe admits, current evidence does suggest possible evolutionary lineages for the origins of the anatomical features of the eye, for example, that eyes originated as simple patches of photoreceptor cells that could detect the presence or absence of light, but not its direction. By developing a small depression for the photosensitive cells, the organisms obtained a better sense of the light's source, and by continuing to deepen the depression into a pit so that light would strike certain cells depending on its angle, increasingly precise visible information was possible. The aperture of the eye was then shrunk in order to focus the light, turning the eye into a pinhole camera and allowing the organism to dimly make out shapes—the nautilus is a modern example of an animal with such an eye. Finally, the protective layer of transparent cells over the aperture was differentiated into a crude lens, and the interior of the eye was filled with humours to assist in focusing images.[46][47][48] In this way, eyes are recognized by modern biologists as actually a relatively unambiguous and simple structure to evolve, and many of the major developments of the eye's evolution are believed to have taken place over only a few million years, during the Cambrian explosion.[49] However, according to Behe, the complexity of light sensitivity at the molecular level and the minute biochemical reactions required for those first "simple patches of photoreceptor[s]" still defies explanation.
Irreducible complexity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Just because a concept is hard to understand does not mean it can't be understood. Just because nature is complex does not mean we quit trying to understand its processes and say, "God did it".


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