beth@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (beth d. christy) (05/24/85)
[keep :-)ing] In Message <551@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> I posted: >>Keeping these things in mind, thee are some questions that must be >>asked: >> >>In what sense are these eyes "half-developed"? >> >>What are (were) they developing toward/from? >> >>Remembering that these were fairly early organisms, what sort of >>phylogeny shall one construct to show the development of these >>structures? >> >>Yes, it is true that some organisms have *very* simple eyes. But some >>early organisms have very unsimple eyes. So statements about >>half-developed and simple eyes don't show much *unless* the line of >>descent is demonstrated. >> >>Paul DuBois {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois --+-- > >Those eyes were developing into fossils for us to find. They were >"half-developed" because at the time they existed there wasn't anyone >who seriously questioned evolution, and hence they weren't yet useful >as evidence to prove it. Now there are, and now *they* are. That was a pretty flippant response, and was rather uncalled for. Paul stated earlier in his posting that he was responding to the following quote: > [Keith Doyle] > Depends on how you look at it. All species appear half developed, depending > on what you think they are developing toward. and I just ignored his point. So let me respond to it a little more intelligently. I think I would ammend Keith's statement somewhat. I would probably say that the features that were in place when a species became extinct were "fully developed", and that all other features of the species previous to that time were, in some sense, "half developed". I *think* this is less drastic definition that still respects Keith's original intent. (Note that an implication of this empirical definition is that one can not say anything about the "fully-developedness" of features of species that are not either already or very soon to be extinct. To that I say "Oh well". Another implication is that how well the structure fits the current conditions in which it exists is irrelevant to its "fully-developedness". That makes most of the quoting in Paul's posting irrelevant.) Given that, then, what I would probably do to answer Paul's point (assuming I had the energy, of course), would be to go to the library and find out what creatures, if any, there's good reason to believe descended from the trilobites. If there were some, and if their eye structure was noticably different from that of the trilobites, I'd say that's what the structure was developing towards. Otherwise I would grant that yes indeed, the eye structure Paul pointed out was in fact fully developed. But shoot, it's 2 o'clock in the morning and the library's closed. Yet another resound- ing Oh well :-). >Now I have a question for you: Given that there are thousands of >species with eyes, and given that a designer clearly had a concept >and an implementation of such a perfect eye, *why* is there such vast >diversity in the types and relative quality of eyes? Why didn't the >designer recognize a good thing when s/he had it and stick with it? Not only did I completely ignore Paul's original point, I also turned his posting back on him and tried to make him answer something totally unre- lated. Now I happen to think that the above is a valid question, and one that creationists should answer. So I'm not going to retract it. But I will publicly slap myself on the hand for bringing it up in a way that almost invariably leads to confusion, quotes out of context, and other nasty things that really frustrate those of us who are genuinely trying to sort out the facts here. I should have brought it up more gracefully. (I still want an answer, tho!! :-) >The "curious mode of thinking" that Levi Setti has fallen into is >probably a result of taking things in context - something that often >*does* confound creationists on this net. And apparently an occasional evolutionist. Again, my apologies for encouraging confusion. -- --JB "The giant is awake." Disclaimer? Who wud claim dis?