This is false, because an eye can evolve in a few hundred thousand generations.
This is an unsupported claim based on a simplification of the actual evolution it would take to produce a human eye. An assumption has been made on a few basic steps without realistically accounting for the many other steps that are required to produce the level of complexity that’s involved.
This is a common tactic of explaining Darwinian evolution in that it starts with the first step being the already there and functioning without explaining the many other steps in how that got there and assuming the rest happened which often require multiple mutations to be present simultaneously to gain a functional advantage rather than single step mutations.
As Michael Lynch says in one of his papers
Simultaneous emergence of all components of a system is implausible
Evolutionary layering and the limits to cellular perfection
The whole sequence is simplified showing only certain steps without any detail. The fact is there are over 2 million functioning parts in the human eye and the 10 or so simple steps in no way accounts for or explains this.
An eye is composed of more than 2 million working parts
20 Facts About the Amazing Eye - Discovery Eye Foundation
Also false. The ability to detect light or movement is useful for survival, even if the ability is not optimum.
Once again you are simplifying evolution where it doesn’t reflect reality. This is a good example of how people fall for the just so stories made by some evolutionists. You are using the ability to detect light as a one-step wonder when to get to that point requires 1,000s of steps most often with simultaneous multiple mutations with function and benefit first time up. The odds for that are impossible by random mutations and blind selection of Neo-Darwinism.
What you need to do is explain how each of the 1000s of steps needed to get to the light sensitive ability can be useful for survival without causing a non-benefit and causing dysfunction. Evidence shows that even if only 2 simultaneous mutations were needed it would take much more time than evolution claims.
A bit of quick research and you'll see that the original light sensitive cells come from the brain. This is not a major obstacle.
As far as I have read light sensitive ability originated in simple organisms which don’t have a brain. So this shows how you have skipped over many steps and how people buy into the stories created. The question is how this light sensitive ability evolved into the many components required for more complex sight which is connected to the brain.
How did the mechanisms in the eye itself evolve an understanding of what was being seen at the same time. If the eye evolved a new function that was not processed by the brain at the same time then the new function would mean nothing. Yet to do that the right simultaneous mutations needed to happen at the same time which has been shown to be impossible.
Natural selection is not a random and blind process.
I never said it was. But under Neo-Darwinism mutations are random
Modern Synthesis also represents a particular way to understand evolution. It primarily focuses on genes:
- new variation arises through random genetic mutation
Or put another way
Genetic mutation is the result of haphazard processes, such as errors in DNA replication or the influence of cosmic X-rays. In other words, no controlling process or system guides mutation in a way that benefits organisms [3].
About the EES – Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
Natural selection is blind as Richard Dawkins explains
"Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Richard Dawkins the Blind watch maker.
Putting these 2 together makes Darwinian evolution a blind and random process.
How is it false when I have posted the science that supports this above?
Nobody is claiming it happened by a random and blind process.
This is how Darwinian evolution is described as shown above.
Of course it’s a word. It is a common and well-known meaning of evolution under the Modern evolutionary synthesis. IE
Essentially, neo-Darwinism (modern synthesis my emphasis) introduced the connection between two important discoveries: the units of evolution (genes) with the mechanism of evolution (natural selection). By melding classical Darwinism with the rediscovered Mendelian genetics, Darwin's ideas were recast in terms of changes in allele frequencies. Neo-Darwinism thus fused two very different and formerly divided research traditions, the Darwinian naturalists and the experimental geneticists. This fusion took place roughly between 1936 and 1947.
Neo-Darwinism - New World Encyclopedia
But just like Darwins original theory was challenged and updated with Neo-Darwiniam (modern synthesis) so to is Neo-Darwinism.
While the modern synthesis remains the prevailing paradigm of evolutionary biology, in recent years it has both been expanded and challenged as a result of new developments in evolutionary theory. In particular, concepts related to gradualism, speciation, natural selection, and extrapolating macroevolutionary trends from microevolutionary trends have been challenged.
Neo-Darwinism - New World Encyclopedia
So natural selection has been challened as the only prevailing force in evolution.
False. Wiki refers you to actual data. To wit:
You keep saying that and I keep showing that you are wrong. The data that Wiki may link is only showing how the eye currently works. It cannot link any evidence for how the eye evolved as that is past data that is no longer available. Only assumptions can be made for how the eye may have evolved based on the current way the eye is found in different organisms. But the idea that each different eye evolved by Neo-Darwinism from simple to complex from one another is an assumption.
A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve
Abstract
Theoretical considerations of eye design allow us to find routes along which the optical structures of eyes may have evolved. If selection constantly favours an increase in the amount of detectable spatial information, a light-sensitive patch will gradually turn into a focused lens eye through continuous small improvements of design. An upper limit for the number of generations required for the complete transformation can be calculated with a minimum of assumptions. Even with a consistently pessimistic approach the time required becomes amazingly short: only a few hundred thousand years.
Like I said this is based on assumptions and does not take into consideration the realistic steps involved in evolving the eye and even if the eye did evolve simple to complex it is also an assumption it happened solely by Darwin’s theory of evolution. In fact there is evidence that natural selection cannot evolve more complex systems like the eye. IE
There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non-adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation. Several universals of genome evolution were discovered including the invariant distributions of evolutionary rates among orthologous genes from diverse genomes and of paralogous gene family sizes, and the negative correlation between gene expression level and sequence evolution rate. Simple, non-adaptive models of evolution explain some of these universals, suggesting that a new synthesis of evolutionary biology might become feasible in a not so remote future.
Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics
The goal here is to dispel a number of myths regarding the evolution of organismal complexity (Table 1). Given that life originated from inorganic matter, it is clear that there has been an increase in phenotypic complexity over the past 3.5 billion years, although long-term stasis has been the predominant pattern in most lineages. What is in question is whether natural selection is a necessary or sufficient force to explain the emergence of the genomic and cellular features central to the building of complex organisms.
One could even argue that the stringency of natural selection is reduced in complex organisms with behavioural and/or growth-form flexibilities that allow individuals to match their phenotypic capabilities to the local environment. Some of these shortcomings have recently attracted attention, and a scaffold for connecting evolutionary genetics, genomics, and developmental biology is slowly beginning to emerge (59⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–66).
The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity
That emergence has partly come in the form of developmental processes which can facilitate and explain the evolution for how complex organs such as eyes came about. Basically all eyes come from a similar set of genetic information that was around very early for which the creation of various eyes can come about by using existing information rather than blindly and randomly evolving new functions. This makes more sense considering the evidence that the complexity and precision of the eye would be beyond Darwinian evolution alone.
Of particular interest is the observation that phenotypic variation can be biased by the processes of development, with some forms more probable than others [12,17,25–28]. Bias is manifest, for example, in the non-random numbers of limbs, digits, segments and vertebrae across a variety of taxa [25,26,29,30], correlated responses to artificial selection resulting from shared developmental regulation [31], and in the repeated, differential re-use of developmental modules, which enables novel phenotypes to arise by developmental rearrangements of ancestral elements, as in the parallel evolution of animal eyes [32].
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1813/20151019
The potential macroevolutionary significance of developmental bias is further exemplified by hundreds of examples of repeated co-option and recruitment of the same developmental pathways into the building of analogous structures and organs in otherwise unrelated organisms [reviewed in Shubin et al. (2009) and Held (2017)]. Some of the most spectacular cases include the independent evolution of eyes across phyla (Mercader et al. 1999; Kozmik 2005; Kozmik et al. 2008). ); in each set of cases the same set of pre-existing genes, pathways, and morphogenetic processes was used to arrive at functionally highly similar outcomes.
Rather than reflecting constraint, such cases are consistent with developmental systems shaping evolutionary trajectories by generating opportunities to evolve complex structures repeatedly, reliably and regardless of taxonomic context. At the same time, the number of genetic changes needed to evolve a lineage-specific eye, is significantly reduced compared to a scenario requiring the de novo evolution of genes for each structure.
https://www.genetics.org/content/209/4/949