Darwinist Tries in Vain to Resurrect the Bad Design Argument

No bad design. Desiree Linden won the 2018 Boston Marathon. Image courtesy of Gr5555, CC BY-SA 4.0.




Joel Kontinen

Atheistic evolutionists are fond of using theological arguments. While they don’t believe in God, they think they know how He would not have created.

They also think that they know what is bad design and what isn’t.

Richard Dawkins, for instance, has been very vocal with his view of the backward wired retina, which actually happens to be an illustration of very good design.

It seems that smart is the adjective the best describes our eyes.

Another failed Darwinian argument is that our genome is full of junk, of both DNA and RNA.

And the vestigial organ argument has fared even worse.

However, recently biologist Nathan Lents tried to resurrect some failed evolutionary arguments that he calls design glitches.

In addition to the above, he also mentioned our supposedly weak knees, which happens to be a bizarre claim, given that humans can run a marathon, provided they train sufficiently for it.

Sources:

Laufmann, Steve. 2018. Your “Botched Body”: Bad Design or Bad Logic? Evolution News & Science Today (18 April).

Lents, Nathan H. 2018. The Botch of the Human Body. Wall Street Journal (13 April).

Amazing Design: The Human Eye Inspires Better Cameras

Engineers are mimicking the amazing design of the human eye. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).




Joel Kontinen

Richard Dawkins is fond of using the bad design argument for the human eye. He has said that no engineer would come up with such a lousy design with the inverted retina.

Eye specialists disagree with Dawkins. They know what they are saying. Now, engineers at Sony are using the human eye as a model for constructing better cameras.

According to an article in IEEE Spectrum, Sony engineers “have created a set of curved CMOS image sensors using a ‘bending machine’ of their own construction. The result is a simpler lens system and higher sensitivity, Kazuichiro Itonaga, a device manager at Sony’s R &D Platform ...reported.”

“A curved CMOS sensor has a few advantages over a planar sensor, Itonaga said. Because of the geometry, it can be paired with a flatter lens and a larger aperture, which lets in more light. Photodiodes at the periphery of a sensor array will be bent toward the center, which means light rays will hit them straight on instead of obliquely.”

Sony engineers believe that curved systems are 1.4 times more sensitive at the centre of the sensor and twice as sensitive at the edge.
Obviously, they do not think that the human eye is designed poorly.

This is yet another instance of biomimicry or copying a wonderful solution we see in nature.

Instead of the haphazard products of blind Darwinian processes, engineers see intelligently designed systems in nature.

Source:

Courtland, Rachel. 2014. Sony Creates Curved CMOS Sensors That Mimic the Eye. IEEE Spectrum (12 June).

No Bad Design in the Human Eye, Expert Says

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




Joel Kontinen

Richard Dawkins has used the inverted retina argument in an attempt to say that an intelligent creator could not have designed the human eye.

Poor design is a favourite argument but it is nevertheless a bad argument.

Recently, Creation Ministries International released a YouTube video clip that looks at it and finds it wanting:

“This claim doesn't make sense, after all, octopus retinas are wired in the supposedly correct way but their sight is poor compared to ours.

Ophthalmologist Dr Peter Gurney has shown there are good reasons our eyes are wired the way they are. In particular, it allows our photoreceptors to be in close contact with two special tissues necessary for regenerating the photoreceptors and absorbing excess heat. But these tissues are both opaque, so if our retinas were wired the other way you'd be trying to look through two opaque surfaces, which means you'd see nothing.”

The video also points out that eagles “have the same wiring as us and they are renowned for their eagle eyes.”