The Missing Link and the Irreducible Complexity of the Eye

[Pat Mustard]

even a poorly performing eye organ is better (from a survival aspect) than not having one at all

Not necessarily. People always talk about a photosensitive cell. By itself, it's no better than nothing at all.

For any creature which spends an appreciable amount of time above ground, the ability to sense and interpret light is an advantage. So yeah, photosensitive cells are better than nothing at all.

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Consider: Most animals having a neurosystem have nerves at the skin for heat detection. The odds are that that photosensitive cell would be linked to a nerve at one point or another. And given the complexity of even nonhuman brains, and their plasticity, I don't see that a scaffold has not already been built.

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Given the fact that evolution works in populations, based on the intermingling of genetic material through sex, it's obvious that even when you're working on chance alone, you must compute the odds in parallel, rather than serially. The larger the population, the more likely the mutations are, and the larger the pool they have in which they may spread -- and more importantly, interact.

Also, when you consider that the time that evolution has had on Earth is now suspected to be upwards of three billion years, working on enormous numbers of "dice rolls", it doesn't strike me as "peculiar" that complex life might arise.

Is it likely? Your guess is as good as mine. But we're certain that it has happened in at least one instance.

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When early (read: before procreation) death culls the stupid, sure.

Alpha seems incapable of understanding the concept of natural selection .Which by the way yup stupid creatures tend to die .Intelligence or some other positive adaptation  tends to be a boon when everything wants to eat you. And you live on a planet that tends to kill things. 

Second there is the fact that it does have to be immediately advantageous . Hell even detrimental stuff sticks around as long as it's not immediately fatal. Then there are neutral mutations .

What most creatards don't get, including both Wooters and Alpha Male, is that while whether individual mutations are beneficial or not may be up to chance, whether a mutation propogates through a species or not is most definitely not. If an animal has a mutation that allows it to survive better in its environment, or allows it to adapt better to a changing environment then it has a better opportunity to survive and propogate passing the mutation on to its progeny. Natural selection due to environment ensures that evolution is non-random.