" Truth and Fact unlike science does not need to change. Many of the posts
are so vague and filled with scientific sounding garbage void of common
sense I just bite my fingers and let it slide. But this one I do know a
little about. And before anyone asks "No" I do not have a Phd!
If a fish swimming in a pond gets it's face bit off up to it's eyeballs
that could be understood as random evolution. Bits fish hanging out of
it's gills yet still alive. Now how long will it take for the fish to grow
another mouth?
The eye, most animals have at least two is a vastly more complex
question to ponder.
<Big Denton quote>
The human eye is so much more complex than the camera yet 25 years of
education says that if you find a camera in the wilderness (or a
hasselblad) on the moon only the greatest illogical and indoctrinated
faith would imagine evolution without a designer. Even Hasselblad's cannot
fix themselves. For that matter very few camera repair people can either.
Randy Landrum "
I guess my biggest response to this was "Huh?" I admit that Midgley's
quote wasn't specific...I hope someone can give me a ref. for more info on the
evolution of mammalian eyes...(info on the deevolution of them would be even
better)...I don't see what fish getting their faces bit off has to do with
anything, or what having a PhD or not has to do with anything (I;m still
working on the B.S.). On Denton, I see this kind of information as being a
first, tiny step towards doing what Darwin couldnt: reconstructing the history
of the eye to see how it evolved (or if it evolved). I know there are more
with-it ID types out there. I thought up what I thought was a good response
already: that the orignal, general plan of the eye was IDed, and micro (or
maybe something just a bit more than micro) took over after that. The Midgley
quote doesn't address that deeper question.
The valuable thing about the post was the raising of the camera-eye
analogy. The standard argument seems to go "Camera are complex and designed,
therefore since eyes are complex, they too must be IDed". The definition of
complexity and the proof of the idea complexity=ID have avoided people for a
long time. I think one of the problems with the complexity argument is that,
for humans at least, "well-designed" things are usually simple, not complex. I
think most engineers would agree that the more simple a machine or process is,
the fewer things can go wrong with it performing it's function. If there is a
counterexample in engineering I would like to hear it. So perhaps we should
look for simplicity in discovering ID. I'm not sure we find it in the eye - I
admit it's capabilities are awe-inspiring, but we know of a zillion things tht
can go wrong with it (I've got red-green colorblindness, for example, along
with 7% or so of the males in the U.S.).
Two more examples just hit me: university administrations and the U.S.
government bureaucracy. Lots of complexity, little to no intelligent design.
So, is the eye more like a nice simple camera with no extra parts, or
more like the U.S. government, basically functioning but having lots of
paperwork, silly rules, inefficiancy, relic agencies, systematic errors and
vestigial traits and no reason for the way it is except the contingencies of
history? Lemme know what you think.
Thanks,
Nick