Archive: Eye Perfection, Whale Evolution, Altruism, Diamonds, Asteroid Life
These CEH articles from May 2002, lost in a website upgrade, are posted again here for amazement or amusement.
Note: Some embedded links may no longer work.
The Eye: Best of All Possible Optics? 05/09/2002
The eye has a problem: different wavelengths focus differently. Blue light, with a shorter wavelength, is more sensitive to longitudinal and transverse chromatic aberration than red. With one lens, and one retina, how does the eye achieve good focus across all wavelengths? How does it avoid contrast reversal when scanning across a scene? Scientists have thought that the blue-sensitive cones used macular pigment to selectively absorb short wavelengths to offset the effects of aberration. But now, writing in the May 9 Nature, four optical experts from Spain and Massachusetts have calculated and measured the optical quality of real eyes, and found that blue light is not as blurred as previously thought.
For one thing, the blue-sensitive cones in the retina have a narrower bandwidth that limits the blurring, and the red and green sensitive cones have bandwidth that overlaps somewhat. The scientists did experiments with human subjects and also took into account monochromatic aberration across the full spectrum of visible light and the spatial density of the different cones across the retina. They found that, although there were trade-offs and compromises, all the cones, working together, achieve the optimum response with minimum aberration:
It has been widely assumed that chromatic defocus from the eye’s optics degrades the retinal image of short-wavelength light. But this assumption has not previously been tested in a manner that takes into account all of the eye’s optical aberrations, measured at multiple wavelengths. We have shown that there is actually little variability in the eye’s image quality, as quantified by MTF [modulation transfer function, a measure of image contrast quality], across the visible spectrum. Wave aberrations cause the visual system to sacrifice resolution at a single wavelength but allow it to gain approximate constancy in spatial sensitivity across the spectrum. This constancy might provide an even more effective solution to the problems of chromatic blur than could be attained by attenuation and sparse sampling of short-wavelength light in an eye with perfect optics.
(Emphasis added.) Their paper is entitled, “Imperfect optics may be the eye’s defence against chromatic blur.” They also suspect that macular pigment, not therefore needed to improve optical quality, may instead be present to help protect the eye from high-wavelength damage.
This is just one example of the kind of detail in engineering the body performs so effortlessly, that we take for granted. In evolutionary terms, every little improvement would be caused by accident, and would have to benefit survival so much that all without the accident die. Clearly, intelligent design is the superior explanation. Here we see the interesting design approach that, given the physical constraints of the laws of electromagnetic radiation, designing an apparent “imperfection” can actually lead to greater overall performance! How did the eye figure that out?
Whale Evolution Hinged on Inner Ear Shrinkage 05/09/2002
Even before the publication in Nature May 10 came out, the news media like the BBC News were jumping on a story about whale’s ears and evolution. Scientific American explains that “computed tomography” of the semicircular canals in fossil whale skulls indicates they shrunk rapidly (5 million years) while the rest of the skeleton took 10 million years to go from dog-like animal to blue whale. Once the semicircular canals, which are essential for balance on land but presumably less so in water, shrank, they would have rendered the animal useless on land, so this must have marked a point of no return.
The paper is another by Hans Thewissen, one of the staunchest advocates of whale evolution. We want to see the raw data on which this tale of a whale rests. When you sweep away the cobwebs of storytelling, not much remains. Since the delicate soft tissues of semicircular canals would likely not fossilize, how much of their size and shape is inferred? How did they identify the fossil? How did they date it? How much of the story was force-fit into the theory of whale evolution? How do they know the effect of canal size on the actual vertigo experienced by a whale? Why would a walking mammal want to live in the water the same time its semicircular canals shrunk by a mutation?
The alleged fossil series is largely based on imagination, piecing together several different skeletons into a presumed evolutionary story. We’ve seen this before, with the horse, for instance. Generations of students were given neat diagrams of horse evolution in textbooks, but then the truth came out: that the alleged ancestors lived on different continents and some were contemporaneous. Now, the explanation is that the evolutionary history of the horse is more like a branching bush than a tree. If you sweep away all evolutionary assumptions out of this latest story, you find no evolutionary evidence. It is unwarranted to justify a theory on such flimsy data.
In actuality, the gaps tell more than the links, and even within their own paradigm. Now they have to explain how dog-size animals evolved into blue whales in a much shorter time than they earlier believed. The ear is just a tiny part of a much bigger tale that must be told: the evolution of sonar, navigation in the dark, breathing from the mouth to a blowhole on the back, powerful fins and tail flippers, and much, much more. All this had to happen, by chance mutations, within 10 million years, a “mere blink of evolution,” as the BBC calls it.
This story teaches us two morals about bluffing evolutionary headlines: (1) always look for the raw data, and (2) always look for the new problems the claim creates.
Oxford Scientists Debunk Evolutionary Theory of Altruism 05/07/2002
The kin-selection theory by William Hamilton in 1963 is “often regarded as one of the most (or even the most) important evolutionary insights of the recently finished century” by Darwinists, purporting to explain altruism: why one animal will sacrifice itself for the good of the group. Hamilton devised a formula that related how an individual’s “altruistic” behavior could affect the fitness of the population and therefore be preserved genetically; basically, the benefit to the receiver of the altruism (reproductive success) exceeded the cost to the giver. Theories of sex-ratio conflicts were used to explain the evolution of colonial insects like ants and bees that control the reproduction of caste members (workers, queens) to affect the fitness of the colony. Many evolutionists regarded these ideas as compatible and complementary.
But now, in a paper entitled, “Sex-ratio conflicts, kin selection and the evolution of altruism,” in the May 7 online preprints of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Oxford zoologists Wladimir J. Alonso and Cynthia Schuck-Paim have shown Hamilton’s Rule and kin selection theories, and the examples cited to illustrated them, to be untested, untestable, vague, self-contradictory and circular. The theories provide no basis for the encoding of genes that would originate or perpetuate the observed social organization strategies and behaviors.
This is a damaging paper; it offers no alternative, other than possibly the “selfish gene” concept (a personification fallacy), but spends most of its time undermining the theoretical, logical and experimental bases for these theories which have been touted for years as great Darwinian insights even applied to humans.
Notice that creationists did not write this paper: it is published in PNAS, and was reviewed by Edward O. Wilson, the strongly anti-creationist Harvard biologist who sees the whole of reality in terms of evolution. When evolutionists undermine their own theories, including ones that have been called “one of the most (if not the most) important evolutionary insights” of the 20th century, are we to merely acquiesce to the dogmatic claims that evolution is a fact? Few people will read and appreciate this paper in PNAS, but millions will watch a Discovery Channel program on the “evolution of altruism” and be led to believe that human altruism and romance are just survival mechanisms explained by Darwinian theory. Darwin is the Wizard of Oz* that dazzles its subjects with awesome powers. Here at Creation-Evolution Headlines, we pull back the curtain.
*These days, CEH calls Darwin the “Blunderful Wizard of Flaws” (9 May 2024 commentary).
Like a Diamond in the Sky 05/07/2002
Space dust may contain nanometer-sized diamonds, thinks Geoffrey Clayton of Louisiana State, who wrote his theory in the June 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. If so, the Milky Way could contain 1041 grams of diamonds– a million trillion trillion trillion carats. For a summary, see Nature Science Update.
The spectral signature could come from something else, so this should be taken only as a preliminary suggestion, although diamond dust has also been found in meteorites. Weren’t we taught diamonds needed the intense heat and pressure of the earth for their formation? However they formed, this finding, if true, should add new luster to our stargazing. (But teach your kids this is not what makes stars twinkle.)
A verse to ponder: Philippians 4:19.
Looking for Life on Asteroids 05/06/2002
Exclusive Dr. Freeman Dyson, a “visionary scientist of international renown” told employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Monday that watery planets may not be the only place to look for life. If life forms could concentrate sunlight, such as focusing it through transparent domes, they could survive on the surfaces of small asteroids. Since near encounters of small rocky bodies in the outer solar system are not that rare, life forms might transfer between them and proliferate on small asteroids. “Any life form that adapted successfully to a vacuum environment would be likely to spread widely over objects with icy surfaces in the outer regions of the solar system,” he speculates.
When you come to California, you expect to find Fantasyland in Anaheim, not Pasadena. If you want to wish upon a star and have your dreams come true, head south of JPL about 30 miles, and there you can create imaginary worlds where flowers evolve in the vacuum of space with little light-collecting domes around them, riding asteroids like Sky Ride gondolas around the solar system. Yet Dyson’s fantasyland, pure speculation with no evidence whatsoever, was presented in all seriousness at a scientific research institution. He believes, like most Darwinists, in a sort of pantheistic vitalism, that imagines that atoms wish to organize themselves into life forms and then populate every niche in the universe. When asked why an organism, living comfortably at a warm hydrothermal vent under Europa’s ice, would ever want to migrate out to the vacuum of space, when every step would have to provide a selective advantage (i.e., time for the Reality Check), Dyson replied with a chuckle from the audience that “the details are a little fuzzy.” Fuzzy was he.