I'd like Evolutionists to try to explain the development of the Eye and the Brain to me. Or is this another "unknown" that we must just place our faith in?

The Eye:

“There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems.” Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 179.

“While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged. Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (ms) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of [1985] Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second.” John K. Stevens, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,” Byte, April 1985, p. 287.

“The retina processes information much more than anyone has ever imagined, sending a dozen different movies to the brain.” Frank Werblin and Botond Roska, “The Movies in Our Eyes,” Scientific American, Vol. 296, April 2007, p. 73.

“Was the eye contrived without skill in opticks [optics], and the ear without knowledge of sounds?” Isaac Newton, Opticks (England: 1704; reprint, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), pp. 369–370.

“Certainly there are those who argue that the universe evolved out of a random process, but what random process could produce the brain of a man or the system of the human eye?”
From a letter written by Dr. Wernher von Braun and read to the California State Board of Education by Dr. John Ford on 14 September 1972.

“What random process could possibly explain the simultaneous evolution of the eye’s optical system, the nervous conductors of the optical signals from the eye to the brain, and the optical nerve center in the brain itself where the incoming light impulses are converted to an image the conscious mind can comprehend?” Wernher von Braun, foreword to From Goo to You by Way of the Zoo by Harold Hill (Plainfield, New Jersey: Logos International, 1976), p. xi.

It is hard to accept the evolution of the human eye as a product of chance; it is even harder to accept the evolution of human intelligence as the product of random disruptions in the brain cells of our ancestors. Robert Jastrow, “Evolution: Selection for Perfection,” Science Digest, December 1981, p. 87.

To suppose that the eye 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 degree. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 175.

The Brain:

“And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.” Isaac Asimov, “In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even,” Smithsonian, August 1970, p. 10.

Asimov forgot that the brain, and presumably most of its details, is coded by only a fraction of an individual’s DNA. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that DNA is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter known in the universe.

The human brain itself serves, in some sense, as a proof of concept [that cool petaFLOPS machines are possible]. Its dense network of neurons apparently operates at a petaFLOPS or higher level. Yet the whole device fits in a 1 liter box and uses only about 10 watts of power. That’s a hard act to follow. Ivars Peterson, “PetaCrunchers: Setting a Course toward Ultrafast Supercomputing,” Science News, Vol. 147, 15 April 1995, p. 235.

“The human brain consists of about ten thousand million nerve cells. Each nerve cell puts out somewhere in the region of between ten thousand and one hundred thousand connecting fibres by which it makes contact with other nerve cells in the brain. Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1015 or a thousand million million. ... a much greater number of specific connections than in the entire communications network on Earth.”
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis - pp. 330–331.

I hope we can leave our beliefs out of this thread and talk strictly Science.

Fire away!!!

That is easy.......Evolution does not need a math class to do its thing, and evolution has had Billions of years to work on its tools where we humans have had, what? 10,000 years, with 150 years of industrial age and 40 or so years for electronics/computers.

Also the advances that humans make can be said to be a part of evolution too.

The world is filled with eyes. Animals sport everything from simple "light or not" eyes up to one far superior to the human eye in ability to see in low light or at long distances. There are even bacteria with photosensitive chemicals that they use to move toward or away from light.

The eye is no more complex than many other structures.

Most of all, the amount of creatures with eyes and neurological systems is the best argument FOR evolution showing that the eye developed early given that most animals have eyes, even vestigial ones.

Over time some have become more complex. We even have a wide degree of variation among the human population today with color blindness, blindness, need for glasses, and other ocular issues.

only reply you'll get from me...

Originally posted by B.A.C.
The Eye:

“There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems.” Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 179.

He was wrong and found that out at Dover.

“While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged. Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (ms) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of [1985] Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second.” John K. Stevens, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,” Byte, April 1985, p. 287.

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

“The retina processes information much more than anyone has ever imagined, sending a dozen different movies to the brain.” Frank Werblin and Botond Roska, “The Movies in Our Eyes,” Scientific American, Vol. 296, April 2007, p. 73.

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

“Was the eye contrived without skill in opticks [optics], and the ear without knowledge of sounds?” Isaac Newton, Opticks (England: 1704; reprint, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), pp. 369–370.

lol

Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

“Certainly there are those who argue that the universe evolved out of a random process, but what random process could produce the brain of a man or the system of the human eye?”
From a letter written by Dr. Wernher von Braun and read to the California State Board of Education by Dr. John Ford on 14 September 1972.

Strawman. Evolution is chance and necessity.

“What random process could possibly explain the simultaneous evolution of the eye’s optical system, the nervous conductors of the optical signals from the eye to the brain, and the optical nerve center in the brain itself where the incoming light impulses are converted to an image the conscious mind can comprehend?” Wernher von Braun, foreword to From Goo to You by Way of the Zoo by Harold Hill (Plainfield, New Jersey: Logos International, 1976), p. xi.

Strawman. Evolution is chance and necessity.

It is hard to accept the evolution of the human eye as a product of chance; it is even harder to accept the evolution of human intelligence as the product of random disruptions in the brain cells of our ancestors. Robert Jastrow, “Evolution: Selection for Perfection,” Science Digest, December 1981, p. 87.

Strawman. Evolution is chance and necessity.

To suppose that the eye 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 degree. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 175.

Quote mine.

The Brain:

“And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.” Isaac Asimov, “In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even,” Smithsonian, August 1970, p. 10.

Asimov forgot that the brain, and presumably most of its details, is coded by only a fraction of an individual’s DNA. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that DNA is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter known in the universe.

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

The human brain itself serves, in some sense, as a proof of concept [that cool petaFLOPS machines are possible]. Its dense network of neurons apparently operates at a petaFLOPS or higher level. Yet the whole device fits in a 1 liter box and uses only about 10 watts of power. That’s a hard act to follow. Ivars Peterson, “PetaCrunchers: Setting a Course toward Ultrafast Supercomputing,” Science News, Vol. 147, 15 April 1995, p. 235.

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

“The human brain consists of about ten thousand million nerve cells. Each nerve cell puts out somewhere in the region of between ten thousand and one hundred thousand connecting fibres by which it makes contact with other nerve cells in the brain. Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1015 or a thousand million million. ... a much greater number of specific connections than in the entire communications network on Earth.”
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis - pp. 330–331.

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

Originally posted by B.A.C.
According to Mathematics there wasn't enough time.

Lol, NO.

There was plenty of time...

Here is my question, and I'm not gonna ask again (and NONE of the heavy supporters of ID EVER answered it):

What is out there which opposes (disproves, makes illogical) INFINITE causality chain to exist ?

If Universe was around for the infinite amount of time, even if everything was just a pure chance, there was still plenty of time

Originally posted by 5thElement

Originally posted by B.A.C.
According to Mathematics there wasn't enough time.

Lol, NO.

There was plenty of time...

Here is my question, and I'm not gonna ask again (and NONE of the heavy supporters of ID EVER answered it):

What is out there which opposes (disproves, makes illogical) INFINITE causality chain to exist ?

If Universe was around for the infinite amount of time, even if everything was just a pure chance, there was still plenty of time

There is nothing that disproves infinite causality chain. Simple.

Evolutionary Theory says the "common ancestor" arose 3.8 billion years ago. This is "finite", not "infinite". This is a number we can use for calculations. The Human Brain has approx. 1,000,000,000,000,000 connections or 10 to the power of 15. Simply not enough time for Evolution to account for this.

Remember, we are talking about Evolutionary Theory.

[edit on 12-3-2009 by B.A.C.]

Originally posted by melatonin

(My interpretation of your comments, melatonin,

only reply you'll get from me...

Because I don't really want to think about the implications of the questions you are asking, and the information you posted, B.A.C.

He was wrong and found that out at Dover.

The only answer I'm really sure about.

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

Because I said so

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

Because I said so

lol

Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

Because I said so

Strawman. Evolution is chance and necessity.

Because I said so, a little differently

Strawman. Evolution is chance and necessity.

Because I said so, a little differently

Strawman. Evolution is chance and necessity.

Because I said so, a little differently

Quote mine.

I found it first, used it in another thread and now you are quoting it back at me?

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

Because I said so, part 2

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

Because I said so, part 2

Yes, it's quite complex. Evolution accounts for the development of complexity.

Because I said so, part 2



That's not really much of a rebuttal. You basically just said, "I believe in evolution, that's why."

Which is actually LESS believable than someone saying, "The eye and brain are so complex that there MUST have been a Creator, there is no way that level of sophistication could have happened by chance."

All in good fun, melatonin, all in good fun!

Originally posted by sezsue

Originally posted by melatonin

(My interpretation of your comments, melatonin,

only reply you'll get from me...

Because I don't really want to think about the implications of the questions you are asking, and the information you posted, B.A.C.

Nope, it's like talking to a brick wall. I get a more productive discussion from my parrot.

Because I said so

Strawman. Evolution is chance and necessity.

Because I said so, a little differently

Perhaps you don't understand evolution. It's a fairly easy concept. It explains complexity in biology, and involves non-random mechanisms acting on random variations.

There's a few books been written on it in the last 150 years. I suggest maybe finding one.

All in good fun, melatonin, all in good fun!

Lucky you were around, eh? Creationists are a bit like buses, people wait for one and then loads come along one after the other. Although, it's sometimes hard to figure out if it's the same one's going round the block...

[edit on 12-3-2009 by melatonin]

Originally posted by B.A.C.

To suppose that the eye 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 degree. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 175.

Would you like to read the rest of that quote for me? Where he goes on to say that while it SEEMS absurd it is, in fact, NOT.

Here allow me to finish it for you.

"Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an 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, can hardly be considered real.."

Originally posted by lellomackin
"Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an 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, can hardly be considered real.."

Yes thanks for finishing the quote where he goes on to talk about variations of inheritable traits that he thought were the result of climate, diet, and exercise.

Genetics proved him wrong.

Originally posted by B.A.C.
There is nothing that disproves infinite causality chain. Simple.

If that is the case, than it is perfectly reasonable to assume that it could be true and there is no first or ultimate cause, which means that universe always existed and it will continue to exists forever, Creator (A.K.A. God) is out of equation there...

Originally posted by B.A.C.
Evolutionary Theory says the "common ancestor" arose 3.8 billion years ago. This is "finite", not "infinite". This is a number we can use for calculations. The Human Brain has approx. 1,000,000,000,000,000 connections or 10 to the power of 15. Simply not enough time for Evolution to account for this.

Lol, 10 to the power of 15 is impressive number, but it is product of the simple replication, some things can replicate in much greater numbers than that.

Number of synapses in our brain is important, but real power comes from how they are used...

So do you believe that development of the BRAIN before "common ancestor" cannot be accounted as important, do you believe that all those mammals before us did not contribute ?

Where this "math" which claims that there was no time comes from? What are your actual sources ?