Eye of the Beholder

The evolutionist Dr. Ernst Mayer once said:

"--it is a considerable strain on one's credulity to assume that

finely balanced systems such as certain sense organs (the eye of

vertebrates, or the birds feather) could be improved by random

mutations." (E. Mayer, 'Systematics and the Origin of Species' (N.Y.

Columbia University Press, 1942, p. 296)

Darwin once said that the very thought of the complexity of the

eye gave him the chills.

The eye is constructed exactly like a camera except that it is

infinitely more complex and sophisticated. Like some modern cameras,

it has auto-focus and automatic adjustment of the iris. In the case

of the eye, the lens actually changes it's shape or correction to

focus at different distances. The lens is made of living cells that

are marvelously transparent as is the cornea, the window-like skin

that covers the eye.

The most amazing component of the camera eye is it's "film" or

retina. This light sensitive layer, which lines the back of the

eyeball, is thinner than a sheet of Saran-Wrap and is vastly more

sensitive to a wider range of light than any man made film. The best

man-made film can handle a intensity ranges of 1,000-to-one. By

comparison, the human retina can handle a dynamic range of light of 10

billion-to-one and can sense as little as a single photon of light in

the dark! In bright daylight, the retina bleaches out and turns it's

"volume control" way down so as not to overload.

The light sensitive cells of the retina are like an extremely

complex high gain amplifier. There are over 10 million such cells in

the retina and they are packed together with a density of 200,000 per

square millimeter in the highly sensitive fovea. These photoreceptor

cells have a very high rate of metabolism and must completely replace

themselves about every 7 days!

If you look at a very bright light

such as the sun, they immediately burn out but are rapidly replaced in

most cases. Because the retina is thinner than the wave length of

visible light it is totally transparent. Each of these minute

photoreceptor cells is vastly more complex than the most sophisticated

man-made computer.

It has been estimated that 10 billion calculations occur every

second in the retina before the light image even gets to the brain!

It is sobering to compare this performance to the most powerful man-

made computer. In an article published in the computer magazine

'Byte' (April 1985) Dr. John Stevens said:

"To simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a

single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about

500 simultaneous non-linear differential equations one hundred times

and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray

supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such

cells interacting with each other in complex ways it would take a

minimum of a hundred years of Cray time to simulate what takes place

in your eye many times every second."

What makes this comparison even more incredible is the fact that

nerve cells such as the photocells of the retina conduct electrical

signals approximately a million times slower than the circuit traces

or "wires" in a man made supercomputer. Dr. Stevens said that if it

were possible to build a single silicon chip that could simulate the

retina using currently available technology it would have to weigh

about 100 pounds where as the retina weighs less than a gram. The

"super chip" would occupy 10,000 cubic inches of space whereas the

retina occupies 0.0003 inches of space. The power consumption of the

man-made superchip would be about 300 watts, whereas the retina

consumes only 0.0001 watts of power!

Attempts to explain the evolution of the eye, like most other

evolutionary "explanations," are merely untestable scenarios in the

guise of science.

Not only must one account for the eye itself but

also an optically transparent "skin" the cornea, through which the eye

must look, and a brain to process the optical information. The visual

cortex of the brain, together with the eye, which is actually part of

the brain, must translate optical information which begins as nothing

more than differences in the amplitude and wave length of light rays

into what is perceived as real-time 3-dimensional color vision. There

is undoubtedly a scientific explanation for all of this signal

processing and we already know a great deal about it but we are no

closer to a scientific explanation for how we came to have eyes in the

first place.

As radically different as invertebrates are from

vertebrates in all of their organs, the invertebrate octopus has an

eye strikingly similar to that of man!

No wonder the Bible says, "The hearing ear and the seeing eye the

Lord hath made them all."