The Design of the Human Eye

The human eye is a very complicated system consisting of the delicate conjunction of some 40 separate components. Let us consider just one of these components: for example, the lens. We do not usually realize it, but the thing that enables us to see things clearly is the constant automatic focusing of the lens. If you wish, you can carry out a small experiment on this subject: Hold your index finger up in the air. Then look at the tip of your finger, then at the wall behind it. Every time you look from your finger to the wall you will feel an adjustment.

This adjustment is made by small muscles around the lens. Every time we look at something, these muscles go into action and enable us to see what we are looking at clearly by changing the thickness of the lens and turning it at the right angle to the light. The lens carries out this adjustment every second of our lives, and makes no mistakes. Photographers make the same adjustments in their cameras by hand, and sometimes have to struggle for quite some time to get the right focus. Within the last 10 to 15 years, modern technology has produced cameras which focus automatically, but no camera can focus as quickly and as well as the eye.

For an eye to be able to see, the 40 or so basic components which make it up need to be present at the same time and work together perfectly. The lens is only one of these. If all the other components, such as the cornea, iris, pupil, retina, and eye muscles, are all present and functioning properly, but just the eyelid is missing, then the eye will shortly incur serious damage and cease to carry out its function. In the same way, if all the subsystems exist but tear production ceases, then the eye will dry up and go blind within a few hours.

The theory of evolution's claim of "reducibility" loses all meaning in the face of the complicated structure of the eye. The reason is that, in order for the eye to function, all its parts need to be present at the same time. It is impossible, of course, for the mechanisms of natural selection and mutation to give rise to the eye's dozens of different subsystems when they can confer no advantage right up until the last stage. Professor Ali Demirsoy accepts the truth of this in these words:

It is rather hard to reply to a third objection. How was it possible for a complicated organ to come about suddenly even though it brought benefits with it? For instance, how did the lens, retina, optic nerve, and all the other parts in vertebrates that play a role in seeing suddenly come about? Because natural selection cannot choose separately between the visual nerve and the retina. The emergence of the lens has no meaning in the absence of a retina. The simultaneous development of all the structures for sight is unavoidable. Since parts that develop separately cannot be used, they will both be meaningless, and also perhaps disappear with time. At the same time, their development all together requires the coming together of unimaginably small probabilities.350

What Professor Demirsoy really means by "unimaginably small probabilities" is basically an "impossibility." It is clearly an impossibility for the eye to be the product of chance. Darwin also had a great difficulty in the face of this, and in a letter he even admitted, "I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over."351

In The Origin of Species, Darwin experienced a serious difficulty in the face of the eye's complex design. The only solution he found was in pointing to the simpler eye structure found in some creatures as the origin of the more complex eyes found in others. He hypothesized that more complex eyes evolved from simpler ones. However, this claim does not reflect the truth. Paleontology shows that living things emerged in the world with their exceedingly complex structures already intact. The oldest known system of sight is the trilobite eye. This 530-million-year-old compound eye structure, which we touched on in an earlier chapter, is an "optical marvel" which worked with a double lens system. This fact totally invalidates Darwin's assumption that complex eyes evolved from "primitive" eyes.

350 Prof. Dr. Ali Demirsoy, Kalitim ve Evrim (Inheritance and Evolution), Meteksan Publications, Ankara, p. 475. (emphasis added)
351 Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason, Harvard Common Press, 1971, p. 131.