Popeye Surprises Evolutionists

Abrupt appearance is not evolution, especially when it appears in one of the very first animals in the fossil record.

The eyes have it: evidence for sudden, abrupt creation. Such a conclusion is forbidden to Darwin ideologues (see Robert F. Shedinger’s defense of this label at Evolution News). As a result, Darwin worshipers invent fairy tales to explain the evidence, such as the Popeye Theory of Evolution (7 Dec 2011): eyes just “popped into existence” in the fantasyland of Darwin’s Tinker Toy Shop.

Now, even believers in the Popeye Theory are stunned at how quickly eyes popped into existence. Evolutionary biologist Mike Lee uses the word “surprise” six times in his piece at The Conversation, “Eye-opening discovery: 54 million year old fossil flies yield new insight into the evolution of sight.” A press release from Lund University, home of the lead author of the discovery paper in Nature, uses the word “surprise” five times. His statement supports Murphy’s Law of Technology, which says, “All great discoveries are made by mistake.”

“We were surprised by what we found because we were not looking for, or expecting it”, says Johan Lindgren, an Associate Professor at the Department of Geology, Lund University, and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature.

The Fossil

What they found was a fossil crane fly in Denmark so well preserved that even eumelanin (true melanin) was found in its compound eyes. The press release, titled “The composition of fossil insect eyes surprises researchers,” explains that this compound is also found in the eyes of modern crane flies and in human eyes.

Eumelanin – a natural pigment found for instance in human eyes – has, for the first time, been identified in the fossilized compound eyes of 54-million-year-old crane-flies. It was previously assumed that melanic screening pigments did not exist in arthropods.

Who assumed that? Evolutionists. They were wrong. This eumelanin was there in the fossil, as if it had just popped into existence. If they had been creationists, they would not have been surprised.

The Surprise Gets More Surprising

Darwin’s problems with this fossil have just begun. Now, evolutionists have to confront the evidence that eumelanin was also present in the eyes of one of the first arthropods in their phylogenetic tree: trilobites. That’s not just 54 million years ago in Darwin Years. It’s 540 million Darwin Years – ten times as many!

Trilobites are the best-known animals from the Cambrian Explosion. Credit: Illustra Media

The fossilized eyes further possessed calcified ommatidial lenses, and Johan Lindgren believes that this mineral has replaced the original chitinous material.

This, in turn, led the researchers to conclude that another widely held hypothesis may need to be reconsidered. Previous research has suggested that trilobites – an exceedingly well-known group of extinct seagoing arthropods – had mineralized lenses in life.

“The general view has been that trilobites had lenses made from single calcium carbonate crystals. However, they were probably much more similar to modern arthropods in that their eyes were primarily organic”, says Johan Lindgren.

Who held that “general view”? Evolutionists. They were wrong. Eumelanin was not just in crane fly ommatidial lenses, but most likely in the lenses of trilobites 10 times as far back in Darwin’s mythical moyboy timeline. It just popped into existence in the first animals!

The fossilised eyes were surprisingly similar to our own eyes in one important way. The back of our eyeball, called the choroid, is dark and opaque; this protects against ultraviolet radiation and also stops stray light bouncing around and interfering with vision. In human eyes, this anti-reflective layer contains high levels of the pigment melanin, the same molecule involved in skin pigmentation…

Insects, too, have dark anti-reflective layers in their eyes, but this was long thought to consist entirely of a different molecule, ommochrome. Given that insect eyes arose independently from our own and have an entirely different structure, it seems reasonable that their molecular machinery would also be different.

Long thought to whom? Reasonable to whom? Once again, evolutionists, committing the Tontological fallacy, sweep everyone else into their comedy of errors. The facts contradict their “thoughts” and reason. “However, detailed chemical analysis of the fossil cranefly eyes revealed that they contained human-like melanin.”

Darwin Flubber to the Rescue

How can Mike Lee keep his D-Merit Badge in light of this evidence? He smears on some Darwin Flubber, and believes that miracles happened. Well-designed eyes popped into existence on two separate branches of Darwin’s tree, and stayed the same for as many Darwin Years as necessary to keep the fantasy going.

It took fossils to alert us that the eyes of humans and insects both use the same shielding pigments (melanin) – yet another example of convergent evolution.

Intriguingly, the outer layers of the fossilised eyes were full of calcite, the mineral that makes up most of limestone. Not only that, but crystals in the calcite were aligned to transmit light efficiently into the eye.

The paper in Nature observes that, in addition to this perfect alignment in crane fly eyes, the eyes of trilobites were probably similarly made of chitin, which would have avoided several optical problems had they been composed of calcite as previously believed. In other words, they were better designed than evolutionists thought, from the very beginning!

Thus, we conclude that the long-standing hypothesis of calcitic corneas in trilobites requires reconsideration, and that the composition and optic properties of their compound eyes should instead be viewed as akin to those of modern arthropods in being primarily organic.

How do these scientists, all 17 of them, including some big-name paleontologists, rescue Darwin from the data? They use their favorite tactic: BAD (Bluffing Assertion of Darwinism).

Arthropod compound eyes are the most common visual organs found in the animal kingdom, and have an evolutionary history that extends back at least 520 million years to the early Cambrian period.

See also “Cambrian Predator Had Modern Eyes,” 7 Dec 2011.

I’m Popeye the Darwin man;
I fantasize germs to man.
I fight to the finish
To ID diminish;
I’m Popeye the Darwin man.

If you are tired of watching Popeye cartoons with Darwin Party commercials, try educational TV. Watch David Rives and his series, “Creation in the 21st Century.” You’ll actually learn something.