Human Vision

Vision is an amazing ability. Light is reflected from our surroundings and some of this light comes in through our eyes which send signals vias the optic nerve into the brain. This is a huge amount of information coming into the brain all the time that our eyes are open and we are awake!

This immense amount of information is interpretted in tremendous detail by our brain. We 'understand' what we see in our line of vision.

It really is significant that our brains can interpret the stream of information that comes into the eyes at almost 200 miles per hour. It is even more complicated by the fact that we look around and move around continually changing what we see yet the brain creates an almost seamless panoramic 3D picture which we can understand, detect areas of interest, and know what our immediate vicinity looks like!

All of the eyeball and the optic nerve and the brain processing power are needed to allow us to see and to react to what we see. All of this complex mechanism would need to be in place simulateously to pick up these signals and to get them into the brain.

But how could this evolve? The very shape of human and animal faces have a place for the eye sockets. (Presumambly if the optic nerve is too long the brain will not pick up the signals properly.) Yet Any part of the vision mechanism that is not in place during the whole process of evolution would mean that natural selection would remove the useless appendages. Everything had to work at once or it would not be allowed to evolve at all!

This is miles away from Darwin observing that birds with harder beaks survived better in dry seasons! All that happened in this case is that the birds with the harder beaks got more food, bred more successfully and passed on their hard beak genes!

With vision the same process is supposed to create multiple complex mechanisms that are part of an irreducible mechanism. Even if the mechanisms were in place, we would still need the brain to interpret these signals and to allow us (however we define the living 'us') to understand what these signals mean and to make decisions as to what to do next.

It is all too complex to happen by chance. The odds are massive, and remember that any odds greater than 10¹⁸ are deemed to be impossible to happen.

References:

¹ "What Darwin Didn't know - Geoffrey Simmonds M.D. - ISBN 0-7369-1313-0