The Sex Life of 747 Aircraft

The following picture shows eyes of several creatures, as they are found in nature. If you look at the pinhole camera eye of Nautilus (c), you will see that it lacks, among other things, a lens and a cornea. It's really not much more than a light-sensitive hole, open to sea water. It looks very much like a half-formed eye. Well, at least it does if you have a fully formed human eye in mind. But if you're a Nautilus, you'll think it's just perfect. Who needs a lens? And corneas are for wimps, aren't they?Do you still think that a "half-formed" eye serves no purpose? If it happens by almost unnoticeably small steps, it may not be so baffling. When the first creatures with some light-sensitive cells in the skin appeared, they could perhaps sense a shadow looming over them and move to the side. That gave them an edge over creatures who were still completely blind. Then maybe a dent in the skin gave the primitive "eye" a bit more sense of direction. Then maybe an even deeper dent enhanced this. Then came the pinhole camera eye, et cetera. The first light-sensitive patch of skin was a far cry from the function of megapixel sharp colour vision we humans enjoy. But anything was better than nothing. Evolution wasn't working toward developing a distant function, it just used what was available at the time and built on that.I think it is reasonable to say that in an environment where there is light, evolution will, 100 per cent certain, evolve eyes.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Did you know that it may take only one mutation in a certain hight level gene to cause a finch to grow a long pointy beak instead of a stout one? Reading this article on evo-devo might help you understand how. Exactly! Sense, that is what this whole thing hinges on. Or rather, senselessness.Most animal species without eyes live in environments where there is no light. It would indeed be senseless to develop them because the cost of maintaining them is too high in relation to the negligible benefits they might bestow on the creature. But creatures with eyes live in environments where there is light. In those circumstances it would be senseless not to develop eyes, because of the great advantage they give creatures that have them, an advantage which definitely outweighs the cost this time.But however senseless developing eyes may seem (or not developing them, as the case may be), it should really have no bearing on our perspective on evolution, because evolution does not proceed in a sensible way. It is a mindless process of stunning simplicity, with equally stunning results. But above all, it's a process in which whatever happens, just happens. There are no goals, no plans, and no foresights.Those are just things we humans tend to look for all the time, because that is how we operate. This has long been our handicap in trying to understand how living nature came to be so diverse. If you look for a sensible explanation, by which I mean an explanation for perceived meaningfulness, you tend to go overboard on intricacy, and you end up with an explanation that's more inexplicable (e.g. God) than that which you want to explain.But if you, like Darwin, come to understand that what is perceived as very meaningful may in fact be totally devoid of meaning, then you may stumble on a simpler explanation. And the theory of evolution is actually so simple a theory that it can be expressed in just one or two sentences, in plain language. That fact alone, its simplicity, lends the Darwinian explanation a strong sense of veracity if you compare it to the alternatives.And then there's the small matter of a 150 years' worth of physical scientific evidence of course.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

But who says mutations have no cause? The fact that something is random doesn't necessarily preclude a cause. If you threw a die, and you were diabolically clever, you might be able to calculate exactly what jumbles, collisions, forces of gravity and elasticity and whatnot, cause it to show the face it eventually does. But if you did it a million times, each time knowing the exact causes, you would still conclude, from the distribution of the results, randomness.In the same way, a cosmic ray might be the cause of a mutation in a chromosome, but from the point of view of evolution, it would be a random event. Caused, but still random. Adaptation is only adaptation after the fact. Whatever can't cope with the environment for one reason or another goes extinct, and whatever can, is by definition adapted and gets, again by definition, selected. Adaptation is not goal-driven, it is merely following the environment's lead. And they'd be right in thinking so, but then I'd tell them that it wasn't the randomness of mutations that produced the result, but the highly non-randomness of selection. Random mutations are just the raw material that selection builds on.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.