"Bad design" eye ...

[seer]

I already explained how extinctions happen. Seems to me you've had both evolution and extinction explained quite a number of times now. It's hard to dumb down the concepts much further yet you still refuse to understand.

Is it just blind luck that dropped objects fall to the ground?

Nonsense. Of course it is all blind luck, we just happened experience beneficial mutations that helped us survive in environments that we just happen to find ourselves in. Luck, and more luck. Luck that 99% of species that went before us did not have. BTW all objects fall to the ground (if unhindered) - do all species survive? Your example is silly.

[Carrikature]

Nonsense. Of course it is all blind luck, we just happened experience beneficial mutations that helped us survive in environments that we just happen to find ourselves in. Luck, and more luck. Luck that 99% of species that went before us did not have. BTW all objects fall to the ground (if unhindered) - do all species survive? Your example is silly.

It's as if your understanding of what's at work has deteriorated. It's not that we happen to experience beneficial mutations that help us survive in a given environment. On the contrary, the environment is weeding out all the ones that can't survive. It's not any more lucky than having only white marbles when you've been throwing away all the other ones.

[Roy]

Hey guys, Jorge has a point. I too have been hearing this for years - that the backwards retina pointed to bad design. So can the evolutionists here admit that the argument concerning the retina no longer holds water?

Based on a quote that might be mined, misinterpreted, mangled or simply made up? From an institute I've never heard of? Describing results that have not yet been published or confirmed? With no confirmation that the situation described is actually better than the alternative, rather than just optimising a bad start? With not even a mention of the blind spot, or why octopuses eyes are wired the other way round?

Not a chance.

Roy

[Roy]

Are you simple? Tell me Beagle, why has our species survived while most of the species through out history gone extinct? Apart from blind luck?

Because some of us are smart enough to understand the anthropic principle.

Roy

[klaus54]

Nonsense. Of course it is all blind luck, we just happened experience beneficial mutations that helped us survive in environments that we just happen to find ourselves in. Luck, and more luck. Luck that 99% of species that went before us did not have. BTW all objects fall to the ground (if unhindered) - do all species survive? Your example is silly.

You're an incorrigible dope.

How humans turned out was NOT predetermined by evolution. The only "luck" is the weeding out of less fit competitors producing intermediate species leading to H. sapiens where a big brain compensates for a poorly-functional back for bipedalism and lack of strength, speed, and predatory teeth, inter alia, compared with similar sized animals.

Are you a Poe?

It's hard to believe someone, even a YEC, could continually flog the same stupid line of incredulity when the "random, chance, luck" thing has been dealt with dozens of times since I've been on this forum.

K54

[phank]

You're an incorrigible dope.

I think it's a matter of faith that if a simple process can be deliberately misinterpreted enough times, somehow the process will go away.

[klaus54]

I think it's a matter of faith that if a simple process can be deliberately misinterpreted enough times, somehow the process will go away.

Jorge holds to that epistemological technique. Repeat something incorrect and stupid enough times, and it becomes Truth.

I like to call it argumentum ad nauseum or debate by attrition.

K54

P.S. Then when the "evolutionist" side gives up out of sheer exhaustion, the anti-evolutionist can blithely declare victory. (Or bring up the same issue months later and declare it already explained.)

[phank]

Jorge holds to that epistemological technique. Repeat something incorrect and stupid enough times, and it becomes Truth.

I've been saying for decades that the Religious Method (as apposed to the scientific method) is simply to SAY something is true. The Word makes things come true. And saying it twice makes it twice as true. This is the ONLY known way for gods to exist.

Still, seer's dopiness isn't quite the same as Jorge's. Jorge doesn't carefully twist words, misinterpret claims, selectively ignore key points, play semantic games, pretend he never saw any answers to his questions, ask questions which can't be answered without buying into false assumptions, and so on. Jorgy just bleats and excretes.

With Jorgy, you know you're "conversing" with a foghorn, which can only make one sound and has no inputs. With seer, it seems like if you could ONLY find the right words, you could clear up his persistent "confusion" and get through. Until you realize that a couple dozen people have said the same thing in a couple dozen different ways, and seer STILL "can't understand."

[seer]

It's as if your understanding of what's at work has deteriorated. It's not that we happen to experience beneficial mutations that help us survive in a given environment. On the contrary, the environment is weeding out all the ones that can't survive. It's not any more lucky than having only white marbles when you've been throwing away all the other ones.

So we are lucky that we weren't found in an environment that weeded us out - correct? Lucky that we weren't one of the marbles that were thrown away.

[klaus54]

So we are lucky that we weren't found in an environment that weeded us out - correct? Lucky that we weren't one of the marbles that were thrown away.

TEs trust God that "we" wouldn't have be "weeded out".

"We" might have looked different, but once an advanced frontal lobe evolved, God could work with what is.

You certainly don't believe that "we" are physically made in the image of God, do you?

No, even YOU couldn't be THAT stupid!

K54

[Duragizer]

You certainly don't believe that "we" are physically made in the image of God, do you?

No, even YOU couldn't be THAT stupid!

Unfortunately, there are believers out there who do still cling to that stupid notion. I'm gonna give seer the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume he isn't part of that clique.

[klaus54]

Unfortunately, there are believers out there who do still cling to that stupid notion. I'm gonna give seer the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume he isn't part of that clique.

He sure SEEMS to be. His insistence that the notion of evolution that "we" are a result of "luck" seems to indicate that he thinks that "we" were uniquely determined in advance by God. I.e, his view of humans is that "we" were designed in advance to be the exact way we are physically,

If my hunch is correct, he thinks sentient (spiritual?) beings could only be in modern humans' physical form, and that God could not have used another sentient but physically different form to carry His image.

Although to be perfectly honest, it's hard to decipher what's going on in that scientifically-illiterate noodle of his.

One thing for sure is that has a childlike notion of evolution. Also he seems repeating the same garbage over and over passes for a convincing argument.

K54

[Kbertsche]

For the longest time we have had to suffer as Materialists/Humanists/Atheists and their dear compadres (Theistic Evolutionists) used the "bad design of the human eye" argument as supporting evidence that humans Evolved over eons of time and were NOT specially created as Biblical Creationists claimed.

"Look at the bad design of the human eye", we would hear them proudly boasting.
"It is an eye that only Evolution could have produced."
"An all-knowing God would never had produced such a bad design."

Blah ... blah ... blah ...

It's easy to criticize that which is not understood and the eye was and remains way too complex for present understanding. But that didn't stop them with their argument.

Over time a great deal had been discovered to put a sock in the mouth of the nay-sayers.
Did they ever change their tune? No way!

Now we have this:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0227131018.htm.


"The retina is not just the simple detector and neural image processor, as believed until today," said Erez Ribak, a professor at the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology. "Its optical structure is optimized for our vision purposes." Ribak and his co-authors will describe their work during the 2015 American Physical Society March Meeting, on Thursday, March 5 in San Antonio, Texas."

BOTTOM LINE: "For the first time, we've explained why the retina is built backwards, with the neurons in front of the photoreceptors, rather than behind them," Ribak said.

Oh, so NOW you get why God designed this the way He did. NOW you realize that it wasn't a "bad design" as you had boasted as a Pro-Evolutionary argument for all those decades. NOW you can make a public retraction!

What do I expect from this? Nothing! They'll simple reword their argument, move the goalposts back ten or twenty yards, and then continue with their nay-saying. Hey, whatever it takes to defend The Holy Mother of Evolutionism, right?

Jorge

I like the quote regarding this from Bill Pratt on the STR blog:

http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2015/0...-purposes.html

Source: STR blog

Over the years, I have often heard young engineers, who did not design a particular [integrated circuit], criticize the design of that IC by saying it is sub-optimal, that they could do a better job. I have then seen these same engineers eat crow when they finally talk to the original designer and discover the constraints that original engineer was under when he designed the IC and the purposes for which he designed the IC.

It is impossible to judge a design as optimal or sub-optimal without knowing the purposes of the designer and without knowing the constraints the designer faced during the design.

© Copyright Original Source

As a scientific instrument designer, I agree wholeheartedly with Pratt. Only the designer himself can explain what was optimized and why. I find it very presumptive, and usually misguided, when outsiders criticize the lack of optimization of any particular design.

[Carrikature]

I like the quote regarding this from Bill Pratt on the STR blog:

http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2015/0...-purposes.html

Source: STR blog

Over the years, I have often heard young engineers, who did not design a particular [integrated circuit], criticize the design of that IC by saying it is sub-optimal, that they could do a better job. I have then seen these same engineers eat crow when they finally talk to the original designer and discover the constraints that original engineer was under when he designed the IC and the purposes for which he designed the IC.

It is impossible to judge a design as optimal or sub-optimal without knowing the purposes of the designer and without knowing the constraints the designer faced during the design.

© Copyright Original Source

As a scientific instrument designer, I agree wholeheartedly with Pratt. Only the designer himself can explain what was optimized and why. I find it very presumptive, and usually misguided, when outsiders criticize the lack of optimization of any particular design.

This seems relevant, especially the subtext: "You can look at any part of practically anything manmade around you and think 'some engineer was frustrated while designing this'.

[nmanning]

Did you read the actual paper?

Well, there isn't one.

With apologies, I simply do not care much about what physicists claim about biology.

Ever since YEC Physicist Robert Faid claimed chimps cannot talk because they have no vocal cords, I have generally dismissed them.

Their findings are not published, but were presented at a meeting in March, 2015. The press release seems hyperbolic, considering the actual abstract:

Our image of the world is detected by photoreceptors, lying at the bottom of the nearly-transparent retina. Lateral neural layers for processing the image temporally, spectrally, and spatially come in front the photoreceptors, not behind them. This reverse order is a long-standing puzzle, which we wish to explain. We found out that cone photoreceptors are attached to metabolic Muller cells which span the retina. Cones provide colour vision at day time, and are surrounded by sensitive rods which function at night. We showed by an analytical and a computational method that the Muller cells also serve as fibre optics, concentrating green-red light into the cones, while the excessive blue is scattered to the nearby rods. Spatial and spectral laboratory measurements validate that indeed the shapes and refractive index values of the Muller cells and the surrounding retina separate the colours according to the spectral sensitivities of both cones and rods. These results also explain other effects of vision acuity and colour sensitivity.

Hmmm... I guess then we should not be able to see blue very well, yet here I am, looking at the blue sky. and at night? Absence of light is not the presence of blue light.


Yeah... It bugs me when non-biologists try biology.


I have to review grant proposals for a multi-disciplinary funding program. And of late, a few engineers have been submitting proposals looking into engineering/physics aspects of biological structures (with an eye on commercial applications, of course), and I both cringe and laugh at some of their naivete when it comes to the biology they are supposed to be doing research on.

Without more information than an abstract, I feel the same about this.

But of course "Dr."Jorge knows all.