InsaneJournal

The Inside-Out Retina of the Human Eye
Added to my text on evolution: "Unintelligent Design: The Inside-Out Retina of the Human Eye", Vexen Crabtree:

We have dysfunctions, genetic junk, evolutionary dead-ends and obscure morphologies (birds that can't fly, male nipples, etc) and countless other little imperfections that belie the any idea that evolution 'knows' what it is doing. It merely gets by with whatever comes up, and doesn't make future plans. Take the human eye as an example. The history of the eye has been carefully documented by evolutionists; from its basic form in ancient fish, to designs of ever increasing complexity and functionality: the eye is a good example of the haphazard nature of evolution. There was no foresight in its development. This is why us humans have ended up with inside-out retinas. The nerves that carry signals from the rods and cones in our retina lay on the sensors instead of under them. This is because once something starts evolving, there is no easy way to restart the design. Things move on, and new designs build on old ones.

As the eyes increased in resolution, more and more nerves lay on the inside of the retina; their way to the brain remains a hole in the retina which now features as the blind spot in our vision. A little foresight on the behalf of nature would have led to a much more sensible design! The biologist and philosopher Daniel C. Dennett comments, "no intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process".