It is because we evolved from sightless bacteria, now found to share our DNA, that we are so myopic. These are the same ill-designed optics, complete with deliberately «designed» retinal blind spot, through which earlier humans claimed to have «seen» miracles «with their own eyes». The problem in those cases was located elsewhere in the cortex, but we must never forget Charles Darwin’s injunction that even the most highly evolved of us will continue to carry «the indelible stamp of their lowly origin».
I would add to Shermer that, though it is true we are the highest and smartest animals, ospreys have eyes we have calculated to be sixty times more powerful and sophisticated than our own and that blindness, often caused by microscopic parasites that are themselves miracles of ingenuity, is one of the oldest and most tragic disorders known to man. And why award the superior eye (or in the case of the cat or bat, also the ear) to the inferior species? The osprey can swoop accurately on a fast-moving fish that it has detected underwater from many, many feet above, all the while maneuvering with its extraordinary wings. Ospreys have almost been exterminated by man, while you yourself can be born as blind as a worm and still become a pious and observant Methodist, for example.
«To suppose that the eye,» wrote Charles Darwin,
with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
He wrote this in an essay titled «Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication». Since that time, the evolution of the eye has become almost a separate department of study. And why should it not? It is immensely fascinating and rewarding to know that at least forty different sets of eyes, and possibly sixty different sets, have evolved in quite distinct and parallel, if comparable, ways. Dr. Daniel Nilsson, perhaps the foremost authority on the subject, has found among other things that three entirely different groups of fish have independently developed four eyes. One of these sea creatures, Bathylychnops exilis, possesses a pair of eyes that look outward, and another pair of eyes (set in the wall of the main two) that direct their gaze straight downward. This would be an encumbrance to most animals, but it has some obvious advantages for an aquatic one. And it is highly important to notice that the embryological development of the second set of eyes is not a copy or a miniature of the first set, but an entirely different evolution. As Dr. Nilsson puts it in a letter to Richard Dawkins: «This species has reinvented the lens despite the fact that it already had one. It serves as a good support for the view that lenses are not difficult to evolve». A creative deity, of course, would have been more likely to double the complement of optics in the first place, which would have left us with nothing to wonder about, or to discover. Or as Darwin went on to say, in the same essay:
When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect and complex, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever slightly varies, and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should ever be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, cannot be considered real.
We may smile slightly when we notice that Darwin wrote of the sun standing still, and when we notice that he spoke of the eye’s «perfection», but only because we are fortunate enough to know more than he did. What is worth noting, and retaining, is his proper use of the sense of what is wondrous.
The real «miracle» is that we, who share genes with the original bacteria that began life on the planet, have evolved as much as we have. Other creatures did not develop eyes at all, or developed extremely weak ones. There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have eyes but it can create them. The brilliant Professor Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the double helix, had a colleague named Leslie Orgel who encapsulated this paradox more elegantly than I can. «Evolution,» he said, «is smarter than you are». But this compliment to the «intelligence» of natural selection is not by any means a concession to the stupid notion of «intelligent design». Some of the results are extremely impressive, as we are bound to think in our own case. («What a piece of work is a man!» as Hamlet exclaims, before going on to contradict himself somewhat by describing the result as a «quintessence of dust»; both statements having the merit of being true.) But the process by which the results are attained is slow and infinitely laborious, and has given us a DNA «string» which is crowded with useless junk and which has much in common with much lower creatures. The stamp of the lowly origin is to be found in our appendix, in the now needless coat of hair that we still grow (and then shed) after five months in the womb, in our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements. Why do people keep saying, «God is in the details»? He isn’t in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.
Those who have yielded, not without a struggle, to the overwhelming evidence of evolution are now trying to award themselves a medal for their own acceptance of defeat. The very magnificence and variety of the process, they now wish to say, argues for a directing and originating mind. In this way they choose to make a fumbling fool of their pretended god, and make him out to be a tinkerer, an approximator, and a blunderer, who took eons of time to fashion a few serviceable figures and heaped up a junkyard of scrap and failure meanwhile. Have they no more respect for the deity than that? They unwisely say that evolutionary biology is «only a theory», which betrays their ignorance of the meaning of the word «theory» as well as of the meaning of the word «design». A «theory» is something evolved — if you forgive the expression — to fit the known facts. It is a successful theory if it survives the introduction of hitherto unknown facts. And it becomes an accepted theory if it can make accurate predictions about things or events that have not yet been discovered, or have not yet occurred. This can take time, and is also subject to a version of Ockham’s procedure: Pharaonic astronomers in Egypt could predict eclipses even though they believed the earth to be flat: it just took them a great deal more unnecessary work. Einstein’s prediction of the precise angular deflection of starlight due to gravity — verified during an eclipse off the west coast of Africa that occured in 1913—was more elegant, and was held to vindicate his «theory» of relativity.
There are many disputes between evolutionists as to how the complex process occurred, and indeed as to how it began. Francis Crick even allowed himself to flirt with the theory that life was «inseminated» on earth by bacteria spread from a passing comet. However, all these disputes, when or if they are resolved, will be resolved by using the scientific and experimental methods that have proven themselves so far. By contrast, creationism, or «intelligent design» (its only cleverness being found in this underhanded rebranding of itself) is not even a theory. In all its well-financed propaganda, it has never even attempted to show how one single piece of the natural world is explained better by «design» than by evolutionary competition. Instead, it dissolves into puerile tautology. One of the creationists’ «questionnaires» purports to be a «yes/no» interrogation of the following: