Posted: Jun 23, 2014 7:44 pm
DavidMcC wrote:You can kid yourself, maybe, but I have found another old reference, this time in "The Greatest Show on Earth", chapter 11, "History written all over us", p354:
"But now, suppose I tell you that the eye's 'photocells' are pointing backwards, away rom the scene being looked at. The wires connecting the photocells to the brain run all over the surface of the retina... That doesn't make sense...". (My bold) His problem might be that Nikon don't make self-maintaining CCD arrays, so his technical advice was bad from the start. (He quoted his Nikon friend at some point, on camera design.)
There is no problem with Dawkins' argument because it is not an argument for evolution of the eye, that's already a given. Nor is it an argument against a creator/designer, it's an argument against an intelligent creator/designer. And he's not arguing that the eye as it is now isn't excellent at what it does. The argument is that an intelligent designer wouldn't have had to put in as many patches and fixes to make it excellent. If designed properly and intelligently it wouldn't need to be as complicated as it is.
All the arguments in the original post article are for how well the eye works now, which is something that Dawkins never argued against, so it's rather pointless, and amounts to little more than agreeing with Dawkins and then crowing about how right they are in the end.
The main argument in the article is that the backward wiring is required for regenerating photoreceptors after a flash or bright light, but misses the point that if intelligently designed that too could have been done better, making all the fixes and patches unnecessary. A good design is one that accomplishes the goal in the simplest way possible, and the eye is not an example of this.
Let's look at this from the stand point of a good intelligent designer. If the design was set, was simple, and achieved the goal, but with one problem. Do you think that a good intelligent designer would scrap the whole design, turn it backwards and rewire the whole thing, then make other hardware and software fixes to accommodate the new complicated design? I don't. I think that a good intelligent designer would find one fix for the one problem and maintain the simple effective design.