(November 3, 2017 at 11:20 am)Succubus Wrote:(November 3, 2017 at 8:49 am)SteveII Wrote: There are several things wrong with that sentence, but let's stick to the one point. You would need a massive increase in complexity in the processing center to go from the binary light/no light to recognizing shapes and doing something about it that would be a survival benefit. What survival benefit preserved the increasingly complex (but useless) eye until the organism developed the vastly improved processing center?
You don't need a Cray computer to perform basic arithmetic functions, and you don't need a massively complex neural system to invoke a reflex action to a stimulus. No doubt you will now ask 'how could they evolve together'?
The answer is; they almost certainly didn't. It is highly likely the first hundred trillion of these creatures with their proto eyes and proto nervous systems did not have the two synchronized, not to the benefit of the creatures survival that is.
It's highly likely this primitive arrangement at first resulted in the creature freezing when light hit its proto eye and gained no evolutionary advantage. Now fast forward a ~million? years. A handful of UV photons hits the light sensitive patch and whatever passes for a muscular system goes 'kick' and the thing darts off to one side.
What happened to the recalcitrants, the first group? They were eaten!
Evolution in action.
First, recognizing shapes and reacting to them is way way way more complicated then "moving toward the light". It would involve some sort of memory, some sort of if-then-else logic, and some way effect enough movement to make a difference.
You are positing two beneficial mutations that developed brand new functions simultaneously happening...eventually. Then when the organism moved from just light sensing to shape sensing, two new beneficial mutations simultaneously happened as well (one in the "eye" and the other in the nervous system)--because neither the ability to "see" shapes nor the ability to process shapes had any survival benefit until the other was functioning. But we still have a problem. Just sensing the light and processing the sensory information is not enough to confer a survival benefit. The organism must be able to do something about it. So, a third function would have at least been part of the first two steps--simultaneously so the organisms mutation could be selected.
Your description could be right. The point I have made 20 times already in this thread is that we really don't know how these things happened. If we don't know how, it cannot be a scientific fact. If it's not a scientific fact, it is a philosophical claim that it happened.
