Darwin's eyesight? | Sylvia Baker

It is well known that Darwin referred to the eye in Origin of Species, describing it as ‘an organ of extreme perfection and complication’.

He pretended to agree that to suggest it could have been formed by natural selection seemed ‘absurd in the highest possible degree’, but the following sentences reveal what he was really thinking. Darwin goes on to maintain that natural selection could easily have brought about vision by a series of almost imperceptible changes working without a design specification and his modern-day disciples now claim that the evolution of the eye presents no difficulty to them. When this claim is examined, it proves to be a good example of how a faulty belief system can blind one to the evidence and a very good illustration of the adage ‘there are none so blind as those who won’t see’.

What did he know?

Darwin, writing 150 years ago, knew very little about the visual system. He mentions only the basic activity of some of the structures of the eye itself in focusing, admitting different amounts of light and correcting for possible aberrations so as to give a clear image. These processes in themselves are amazing but actually are quite pointless without a system in place to receive the image and change it into a form which can be transmitted by the nervous system. That complex process, performed by the retina at the back of the eye, is itself of no use without the means to transport the visual message to the brain. If the brain itself is not designed to receive the signals and somehow to cause us to ‘see’, then the whole process is of no value whatsoever, as people who have lost their sight through brain damage know to their cost.

The visual system is now known to be almost unimaginably complex; in fact, it may actually be impossible to imagine it. Hundreds of neuroscientists are spending their working lives trying to describe it, let alone understand it. The retina alone occupies many of them. Papers pour out of academic journals in their thousands. In one sense much progress is being made, but in another we are just as far as we ever were from understanding the visual system as a whole and how it produces our sophisticated ability to see.

Mocked in the seminar

I became a creationist while studying biology at Sussex University in the 1960s and this problem of how vision could have evolved was directly responsible. In a seminar we were discussing how the vertebrate eye could have evolved from the invertebrate eye but it was clearly impossible. Eyes possessed by invertebrates (for example, insects) operate according to different processes and are designed in a completely different way when compared with our own. I was mocked at that seminar for voicing the possibility that the one could not have evolved into the other, but a few years later that became the accepted view. It had been realised that there were, indeed, fundamentally different visual systems operating in the animal world, so different that there could be no connection between them. One might have expected that this would have given evolutionary scientists pause for thought, but that did not seem to be the case. Instead, the explanation given was that eyes must have evolved independently a number of times; eventually the figure quoted reached as high as 40.

No trouble today?

In Darwin’s day, many people considered the eye, so far as they understood it, to be too complex to be explained by a blind evolutionary process. Such is the power that evolutionary thinking holds over the mind and spirit, that today evolutionists have no trouble in believing that highly complex visual systems have evolved with no design and no planning over and over again in what is, in evolutionary terms, a short space of time. I have recently heard it publicly stated, on more than one occasion, that the eye does not present any problem to Darwinian evolution at all. Eyes have evolved so often; therefore it must be easy for eyes to evolve! This is said in all seriousness, with apparently no awareness of the circular reasoning involved.

In recent years the discovery of the pax-6 gene has generated a lot of excitement. This gene is involved in regulating the development of the embryo and seems to be able to give the command to the organism to make an eye. Exactly the same form of the gene is found in both vertebrates and invertebrates and evolutionists have hailed it as evidence for evolution. However, I fail to see how it helps them; their problems still remain. The visual systems are different, even if the command signal is the same. This state of affairs is much more easily explained by the view that a Designer is involved, one who wishes to construct different kinds of living things but sees no reason to keep re-inventing the wheel in doing so.

Partial eyesight fallacy

It is impossible for the origins of vision to be accounted for by a process of blind natural selection operating on very minor changes, as Darwin’s theory requires. Attempts by modern-day proselytisers of evolution to do this have bordered on the dishonest. They will sometimes point to a person who is partially sighted, who perhaps has only 10% of their vision, to make the point that even a little vision is better than none. That point is well made, but it has nothing whatever to do with evolutionary theory. Such people would have no vision at all unless the 10% was 10% of the whole system. Once the whole system is in place, damage to it does not necessarily result in total blindness. That situation says nothing whatever about how the miracle of human vision came about in the first place.

Sylvia Baker, 2004. ‘Seeing and Believing — Evolution, the Eye and Sight’. Genesis Agendum Occasional Paper no. 11 (£3.00 + P&P from The Genesis Agendum, PO Box 5918, Leicester LE2 3XE).