LCBOY said:
I think you are confusing form with function. I don't think this is what ID proponents are arguing here. Yes, other creatures have "limited vison" compared to say mammals but all the strutures that make up the "limited vision" are complete and all are in place. Thet ID folks argue that that certain biological structures would simply cease to function at all if even one structure was removed. So why would an animal possess a non-functioning struture (an eye for instance) and pass it along to it's offspring until the process of evolution completes the "building" of the struture and the then the struture goes "online" many generations down the line?
Evolution doesn't work like that. No structure in the history of the evolution of the human eye was ever "waiting" for another structure in order to be useful. Or the human body, for that matter.
No animal ever possesses a non-functioning structure that is waiting. Some non-functioning structures become useful later by happenstance or utility, but those structures aren't waiting.
You say I'm confusing form with function, I don't see how. You are saying that the ID crowd says that incomplete forms don't function. I say that incomplete forms DO function, and "completeness" is an illusion. You can take away more than half the structures in my eye, and Ill still be able to swim away from a predator, if I was a school fish.
It's easy to argue that a living creature's design is "complete", and not a transition to a later "more complete" design, but evolution has no qualms about changing anything! It'll keep adding things all the time.
To get to the modern eye from flat photo-receptor cells on a flatworm, you just need to add one useful piece at a time.
As long as you have incremental useful change, the structures can compound on each other.
For example, the modern human eye. Deconstructing the modern eye to show that it couldn't have evolved doesn't make sense, as all the parts of the modern eye were evolved in an order that made each step more useful than the last.
My eyes would not cease to function at all if certain structures were removed. You could remove my lenses, the fova centralis, the aqueous humor, the muscles to move my eyes, pretty much anything except the photosensitive cells themselves, and I'd be able to achieve some level of survival benefit.
Sure, then my eyes would be simpler, just like other simple-eyed modern creatures.
Simpler eyes still work to save the life of a creature. As long as incremental improvements happened for each step.
