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By Root 439 0

of mass mailings to schools with creationist literature, debates at schools and colleges, and enlisting the aid of mainstream academics like University of California-Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson and Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, and even roping in the conservative commentator William F. Buckley, whose PBS show, Firing Line, hosted a debate in December 1997, where it was resolved that “evolutionists should acknowledge creation.” The debate was emblematic of a new creationism, employing new euphemisms such as “intelligent-design theory,” “abrupt appearance theory,” or “initial complexity theory,” where it is argued that the “irreducible complexity” of life proves it was created by an intelligent designer, or God. In Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, the biochemist, who has become something of a cult hero among creationists, explains this phrase: “By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

Consider the creationists’ favorite example of the human eye, a very complex organ that is, we are told, irreducibly complex—take out any one part and it will not work. How could natural selection have created the human eye when none of the individual parts themselves have any adaptive significance? There are four answers that refute this argument.

1.

It is not true that the human eye is irreducibly complex, so that the removal of any part results in blindness. Any form of light detection is better than none—lots of people are visually impaired with any number of different diseases and injuries to the eyes, yet they are able to utilize their restricted visual capacity to some degree and would certainly prefer this to blindness. The creationists’ “irreducible complexity” argument is an either-or fallacy. No one asks for partial vision, but if that is what you get, then like all life forms throughout natural history, you learn to cope in order to survive.

2.

There is a deeper answer to the example of the evolution of the eye, and that is that natural selection did not create the human eye out of a warehouse of used parts lying around with nothing to do, any more than Boeing created the 747 without the ten million halting jerks and starts from the Wright Brothers to the present. Natural selection simply does not work that way. The human eye is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years to a simple eyespot where a handful of light-sensitive cells provides information to the organism about an important source of the light—the sun; to a recessed eyespot where a small surface indentation filled with light-sensitive cells provides additional data in the form of direction; to a deep recession eyespot where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate information about the environment; to a pinhole camera eye that is actually able to focus an image on the back of a deeply recessed layer of light-sensitive cells; to a pinhole lens eye that is actually able to focus the image; to a complex eye found in modern mammals such as humans. And this is just part of the story—how many other stages of eye development were lost to the ravages of time because there was an organ that did not fossilize well?

We can also use the human eye as an example of bad design. The configuration of the retina is in three layers, with the light-sensitive rods and cones at the bottom, facing away from the light, and underneath a layer of bipolar, horizontal, and amacrine cells, themselves underneath a layer of ganglion cells that help carry the transduced light signal from the eye to the brain in the form of neural impulses. And this entire structure sits beneath a layer of blood vessels. For optimal vision, why would an intelligent designer have built an eye backwards and upside down? This does not make sense. But it would make sense if natural selection built eyes from whatever materials were