Friday, April 25, 2008

Design #43: The Wonder of Our Eyes

How could anyone explain how eyeballs evolved? Even Darwin couldn’t attempt it!

Charles Darwin was once asked about the idea that eyes evolved through three different strains in animals. “I have enough trouble explaining how eyes could evolve once,” he answered. Indeed, how could anyone explain how an instrument that can detect and interpret light images could have come about by accident? Every point below shouts that this would be impossible.
The eyeball, surprisingly, is full adult size when a child is born and will be the instrument of receiving 80% of his total knowledge. Each eye is protected by skull bones, eyelids, eye lashes, eyebrows, tears, and reflexes. Most of us have two of them that see in the same direction, thus giving us binocular vision.
To detect an image, the eyeball must receive sufficient, but not excessive light, and the image must be in focus. To allow in just the right amount of light, each eye has an iris. In most humans it is colored and automatically makes the pupil (area where light can enter) larger as the quantity of light diminishes. If too much light is available even when the pupil is smallest, we will turn away, squint, shade our eyes, or put on dark glasses to protect our eyes.
Focusing is another amazing system. Light passing through the pupil will next pass through the transparent lens that focuses it on the retina. To focus a microscope, we change the distance between the image and the lens. Often this distance can’t be changed when we see something. But the curvature of the lens can. To see a close object, muscles attached to the lens make it fatter. To see distance, these muscles pull the lens out so it is thinner. As a person ages, the flexibility of the lens decreases and he may need glasses to help his eyes focus.
Now the light passes through the vitreous humor (liquid in the eyeball keeping it round) and strikes the retina, the layer of nerves on the back of the eye. (The image exiting the lens is upside down.) Though only 1/90th of an inch thick, the retina contains 127 million light receptors in eight layers! Most of these receptors are rods. They are sensitive to reduced light but can’t see color. The rods contain visual purple to see reduced light. Bright light fades this. So when the lights are out, first our iris enlarges our pupil, and then the visual purple activates. It takes 20 minutes for our eyes to fully adjust. The rest of the receptors are cones that don’t work in the dark but do see color (remember rods- reduced; cones- color).
Once the retina has turned the images into electrical impulses, they are transferred to the brain through the optic nerve where the upside down image is turned over and interpreted. What a marvel!
God claims creative design for the eye (Prov. 20:12). Who else could have done it!

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Posted by Jim at 09:03 AM

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