So how did clearer eye tissues happen to evolve at the same place as the some-several dozen proteins necessary for sight, any one of which if not present would prevent sight completely? And why not an eye in the back of my head? Wouldn't that be handy?I'm not a disbeliever in evolution because it doesn't affect my religious beliefs one way or the other, and I'm absolutely convinced that evolution happens at certain scales. I have no quarrel with the concept -- even as a Christian -- that humans evolved from apes. However, as one who has degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering (and a whole lot of math since school), the odds for all these amazing things happening in the same place -- like the eyeball -- seem pretty slim, no matter how much time you give it.
Darwinism seems nice and neat and tidy from a macro standpoint, like when looking at the similarities between a shark and a tuna, but when you get down to the level of chemical compounds, evolution all of a sudden becomes immensely more complicated than was dreamed of even a few years ago. To come up with something as complicated as the eye, our bodies ought to be full of millions of different chemicals just hanging around for evolution to perhaps find them useful. However, our bodies just aren't that way and we seem to have exactly the chemicals we need -- no more, no less -- in exactly the right places. The old-school Darwinists need to come up with some better answers.
What's the question?
I don't know, but octopuses and mammals independently arrived at the same sort of plan for eyeballs. Furthermore, jellyfish and neon tetra fish both show that transparent tissues can certainly come into being, especially when it means they won't get eaten.
And why not an eye in the back of my head? Wouldn't that be handy?
Maybe it would - spiders have about a dozen eyes and flies, hundreds or thousands. Prey birds have only two eyes, but their visual fields span nearly the entire view, front to back. But predatory birds, like owls, have eyes on the front of their heads, just like we go. Is this evidence of a designer, or evidence that prey animals which can't see behind them are eaten (and don't reproduce), while predators that don't have good stereoscopic vision can't catch prey (and don't reproduce)?
However, as one who has degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering (and a whole lot of math since school), the odds for all these amazing things happening in the same place -- like the eyeball -- seem pretty slim, no matter how much time you give it.
The odds change significantly if the survival of a species depends on it. Consider the odds of a bacterium resisting any given antibiotic. And then multiply these odds by each other to come up with astronomically unlikely odds that no bacterium can possibly resist a few or even a dozen different types of antibiotics.
And then wonder why it is that there exist so many multiply-resistant bacteria, especially in hospitals. Additionally, consider that you can grow a petri dish-full of these bugs with a non-resistant strain, some mutagen, and all the antibiotics you wish to develop a resistance against. Simply dose the dish with a near-but-not-quite-fatal dose of antibiotic #1, and some mutagen, until you have a strain that resists #1. Then repeat with antibiotic #s 2, 3, and 4. (Etc.) At the end of the process, which might only take a week or month, you have not just one, but billions of bacteria that are resistant to every single drug you have exposed them too. Tell me, what are the odds against that? Replace the mutagen with billions of years, and the antibiotics with all the other critters out there that are trying to eat them, and you can get pretty crazy survival strategies, like locusts that emerge only every 17 years, or stick bugs that look just like little twigs.
Darwinism seems nice and neat and tidy from a macro standpoint, like when looking at the similarities between a shark and a tuna, but when you get down to the level of chemical compounds, evolution all of a sudden becomes immensely more complicated than was dreamed of even a few years ago.
On the contrary, my example of how to develop antibiotic resistance is very much understood at the molecular level.
To come up with something as complicated as the eye, our bodies ought to be full of millions of different chemicals just hanging around for evolution to perhaps find them useful. However, our bodies just aren't that way and we seem to have exactly the chemicals we need -- no more, no less -- in exactly the right places.
Not so - there are unexpressed proteins in all of us, that some diseases are simply the unwanted expressions of. Why do we have appendicies? Why do hens have the genes for teeth, or snakes the genes for arms and legs? They're in there, they're just not in use right now. But if non-teethed hens or legless snakes were put under survival pressure, some mutants that did have teeth, or legs, would find a greater chance to reproduce, and we would again see birds with teeth, and lizards, that toothless birds and snakes once descended from.