Trilobite eyes (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 19, 2013, 14:12 (4059 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: These Cambrian animals had very complex eyes and horseshoe crabs today still use similar ones. The amazing part of this story is there are no ancestors to trilobites, before trilobites appeared. Who made these complex eyes? chance?
Every Darwinist's nightmare:-http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/03/looking-a-trilobite-in-the-eye.html?ref=hp -I love these discoveries, and they all deepen the mystery. As always, David, you are providing us with a great education in the wonders of Nature. So please forgive me if I continue to question your conclusions. I'm as sceptical as you about chance creating these complex mechanisms, but what exactly is your alternative explanation? You believe that evolution happened, so I presume you're not suggesting that since there are no ancestors, God indulged in separate creation. (Would it not be wiser to say there are no "known" ancestors?) Or that he "plopped in" these complex eyes. Or that the very first cells preprogrammed trilobites along with all the other new species that appeared (and in the case of trilobites disappeared) during and after the Cambrian Explosion. Either way, that would make nonsense of your anthropocentric interpretation of God's purpose, unless you think he couldn't have made humans without first making trilobites. -However, we have agreed that within the genome of existing organisms is a mechanism which enables some of them to invent new organs as and when the environment demands or encourages such invention. If this is how it happened, the appearance of the trilobites is not a Darwinist's nightmare. Mutations did take place, but instead of being "random" they were directed by the "intelligent genome". The changes were not gradual (a second correction of Darwin), but some neo-Darwinists have already challenged this, and proposed "punctuated equilibrium" as an alternative. Darwin's theory still stands. Evolution driven by genomic "intelligence" instead of random mutation is still evolution, common descent is still common descent, and natural selection is still what determines the survival or otherwise of organs and species.