Evolution of the Eye

In his landmark publication The Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin avowed that “to suppose the eye with all of its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberrations could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree possible.” Darwin went on to label this dilemma as the problem of organs of extreme perfection and complication.

Let’s consider what Darwin was talking about. Think for a moment about the incredible complexity of the human eye. It consists of a ball with a lens on one side and a light sensitive retina that’s made of rods and cones inside the other. The lens itself has a sturdy protective covering; it’s called a cornea, and sits over the iris designed to protect the eye for excessive light. The eye contains a fantastic watery substance that is replaced every four hours. Tear glands continuously flush the outside clean. In addition an eyelid sweeps secretions over the cornea to keep it moist. Of course there are also the eyelids or the eyelashes that protect the eye from dust.

Well, it’s one thing to stretch credulity by suggesting that the complexities of the eye evolved by chance; it’s quite another to surmise that the eye could have evolved in concert with a myriad of other coordinated functions. Here’s a case in point, you have extraordinarily tuned muscles that surround the eye for precision motility and shape the lens for the function of focus. Not only this, but consider the fact that as you look around their are a vast number of impulses that are traveling from your eyes through millions of nerve fibers that transmit information to a complex computing center in your brain, which is called the visual cortex. Linking the visual information from your eyes to motor centers in the brain is absolutely critical in creating a vast number of bodily functions that are axiomatic to the process of daily living.

With this coordinated development of the eye in synergistic fashion, the isolated developments would not only be meaningless they would be counterproductive. Well, what’s happened? We no longer live in Charles Darwin’s 19th century science; we live in an age of scientific enlightenment. What Darwin once thought to be relatively simple actually involved staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that demand explanation. Evolution simply cannot account for this inexplicable Lilliputian world of complexity.