The Human Eye Is Amazing, Can Distinguish Between Virus-Sized Objects

Image courtesy of Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).





Joel Kontinen

Richard Dawkins and all others who advocate the outdated bad design hypothesis of the human eye might not actually shout for joy if and when they hear about a new study that relegates their view to the dustbins of history.

Recently, the Optical Society of America published an article that states:

“The human eye is an amazing instrument and can accurately distinguish between the tiniest, most subtle differences in color. Where human vision excels in one area, it seems to fall short in others, such as perceiving minuscule details because of the natural limitations of human optics.”

It then goes on to introduce a new study:

“In a paper published today in The Optical Society’s new, high-impact journal Optica, a research team from the University of Stuttgart, Germany and the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, has harnessed the human eye’s color-sensing strengths to give the eye the ability to distinguish between objects that differ in thickness by no more than a few nanometers — about the thickness of a cell membrane or an individual virus.”

Never knew we had such an amazing skill:

“ ‘We were able to demonstrate that the unaided human eye is able to determine the thickness of a thin film — materials only a few nanometers thick — by simply observing the color it presents under specific lighting conditions,’ said Sandy Peterhänsel, University of Stuttgart, Germany and principal author on the paper. The actual testing was conducted at the University of Eastern Finland.”

The research is a big nail in the coffin of the bad design hypothesis that has already met with enormous hurdles in the past few years.

For years, experts have been saying that the bad design argument is a bad myth.

Our eyes bear all the hallmarks of magnificent design.


Source:

The Optical Society of America. 2015. Human Color Vision Gives People the Ability to See Nanoscale Differences (9 July).

New Research Highlights Superb Design of the Eye

A cross section of the retina. Image courtesy of Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body (1918).



Joel Kontinen

Richard Dawkins and other evolutionists have kept on insisting that the human eye is an example of poor design. He claims that no engineer would come up with so lousy design with the inverted retina.

Eye experts have shown that Dawkins erred in his statement, and Sony engineers have mimicked the human eye to make better cameras.

Dawkins should probably read a recent article on Phys.org for a more updated view on our eyes. The article is a report on research published in Nature Communications:

“Having the photoreceptors at the back of the retina is not a design constraint, it is a design feature. The idea that the vertebrate eye, like a traditional front-illuminated camera, might have been improved somehow if it had only been able to orient its wiring behind the photoreceptor layer, like a cephalopod, is folly. Indeed in simply engineered systems, like CMOS or CCD image sensors, a back-illuminated design manufactured by flipping the silicon wafer and thinning it so that light hits the photocathode without having to navigate the wiring layer can improve photon capture across a wide wavelength band. But real eyes are much more crafty than that."

The article goes on to explain:

“A case in point are the Müller glia cells that span the thickness of the retina. These high refractive index cells spread an absorptive canopy across the retinal surface and then shepherd photons through a low-scattering cytoplasm to separate receivers, much like coins through a change sorting machine. A new paper in Nature Communications describes how these wavelength-dependent wave-guides can shuttle green-red light to cones while passing the blue-purples to adjacent rods. The idea that these Müller cells act as living fiber optic cables has been floated previously. It has even been convincingly demonstrated using a dual beam laser trap. In THIS case (THIS, like in Java programming meaning the paper just brought up) the authors couched this feat as mere image transfer, with the goal just being to bring light in with minimal distortion.”

In other words, the bad design argument of the human eye is a bad argument. The eye itself is the product of wonderful workmanship.

Source:

Hewitt, John. 2014. Fiber optic light pipes in the retina do much more than simple image transfer. Phys.org (July 21).