Eye Disagree
Where did you get that watch?
When you are looking for something to post about, even junk mail, those shiny political advertisements might be all the inspiration needed.
The Inspiration
The other day I found some old junk mail sitting in a pile for “recycling” in a bag of shiny paper from the last election. I had the election guide from our local paper and a few glossy advertisements from candidates. Our district was not immune from some unusual politicization in the last cycle. It was a common pattern to have new sorts of candidates getting involved in School Board races. Ours is a middle-class suburban district and the issue of what can be part of the curriculum was a hot-button issue around the country. Some of this was centered on “critical race theory” for example. The young lady who came to my door was to be commended as she was making door-to-door requests for support. I do not turn away such visitors and try to at least hear them out.
The Setup
The candidate left some literature for my consideration. I asked her just enough questions to assess her as an option. I ended up voting in the last election and ultimately did not support her candidacy. The literature I got rid of had references to some issues I feel strongly about. I support a substantial offering of STEM options in our schools. One of the references referred to the “right” to teach other theories beyond evolution and put limits on topics taught in history classes.
I followed up on a link or two before I threw it in the “recycle” bag. After a couple of clicks, I noted a term popular in some circles termed “irreducible complexity”. This happens to be a popular term to explain why biological evolution could not have led to higher-order structures and creatures. While just my opinion, I fear when politics, left or right, begin to permeate what we teach to the next generation, we have missed a turn.
The Details
I was raised and educated in a religious school setting and consider my education to be of great quality. I feel likewise for the opportunities my children had in our suburban public school district. For me what constitutes great education is the offering of a diverse curriculum with a focus on ensuring that any given subject is focused ON THAT SUBJECT. I do not think it is viable to teach “pick a number” magic tricks in math class. I do not think long division belongs in an English Literature class. I don’t think astrology belongs in an astronomy class. While history might mention the movement to make lead into gold called alchemy, I would be distressed if it was covered in chemistry class.
The desire to “teach” creationism or its modern alternate intelligent design in biology is foolishness to me. The desire to limit the teaching of history devoid of the examination of race and slavery in the United States seems dumb and narrow-minded. I am in a history book club in my hometown. All writing has a point of view. Books that ignore large stretches of the obvious usually end up in the dustbin of my mind. US History is a triumphant story in my opinion. Some of the battles are long and some are still being waged. It seems that talking and writing about it is a good thing.
My children were fortunate to have all of the options in the district they were educated in. Minnesota has open enrollment and provides a lot of choices for children, especially in the more densely populated Twin Cities. There was even a school of environmental science at the Minnesota Zoo that cooperatively supported high schoolers who wanted to pursue environmental science in high school! The point was, that the breadth of choice in what a student might study in their classes was broad. There certainly was a core curriculum. The goal of the core curriculum is to ensure that our young people receive the fundamental basics to be effective members of society.
The intelligent design movement is not something I would ignore out of hand. I believe it might be a relevant inclusion in a PHILOSOPHY class for example. I think those who want to block its discussion IN THE PROPER FORUM are out of line also. My goal would not be to exclude particular relevant material from the course material. My beef with the movement is a desire to teach philosophy and perhaps even religion in a science class. I am pleased that my children dissected animals in biology class. I would have been bothered if they had instead evaluated detailed drawings of mythical animals like unicorns and griffins. There may be a place for drawings of that sort (perhaps art class) but wasting precious curriculum time with irrelevant and not applicable topics is foolish.
So today, I am going to riff on the topic of “irreducible complexity”. The gist of this term is to identify some aspect of some creature and marvel at its complexity. The next step is to observe that because it is complex, it could have never resulted from a step-by-step process. While a magician can entertain with sleight of hand, it has no place in the classroom. I might enjoy it in a school play though.
Irreducible complexity was introduced with the example of finding a pocket watch on the ground. It was related that if we find a pocket watch, because of its complexity of it, we simply accept there must have been a “watchmaker”. This became the inspiration to posit that such things as the human eye, a rather complex organ could not have evolved because it is “irreducibly complex”. Hence, instead of evolution, regardless of what the genetic record might expose, there must be an eye-maker. This in a nutshell is the key argument proposed for why evolution is bunk. I went out of my way to not be sarcastic nor belittle the presentation I think what I wrote above is close philosophically to the “theory of intelligent design”. When I read it back, before proceeding here, I was genuinely dumbfounded that there was any “controversy” at all!
Setting aside the premise of the pocket watch which of course is inanimate and therefore ILLUSTRATES NOTHING about the animate objects of carbon-based life on this planet, I will proceed. I believe we all comfortably understand that watches and shovels didn’t evolve and a sharply dressed debater is not required. Their evolution was thanks to our wonderful neo-cortex. One frequent example presented as a part of our world that is too complex to have evolved is the human eye. Having only casual knowledge about the anatomy and physiology of the eye will lead to this being brief. That is good as I am strongly committed to my 5-7 read time goal.
For frequent readers, I think it is clear that I have an awesome wonder at the special nature of humanity. I believe that the qualities that outstrip all others for humans are our wonderful second brain in the front, our neocortex. The ability to contemplate, solve problems, and develop language are all tied to this amazing organization of specialized functions in our brains. We are not the fastest, we are not the strongest, and our eyes are inferior in MANY WAYS to other species. We even have some unusual evolutionary deadends that ONLY MAKE SENSE in light of evolution rather than a guided and inspired creation. Here are some of my favorites:
Did you know that our eye, as remarkable as it may seem, only posts images upside down? It was up to the evolution of our brains to turn each image right-side-up before we can even make heads or tails of the world! This is the likely explanation for why we can recognize upside-down objects with little effort. If that were universally true for all of the animal kingdoms, it would seem reasonable. Instead, we are left with the conundrum that other animals evolved differently and don’t have the time delay required to invert every single image in the first place! I’m guessing they react quickly.
In an earlier post, we talked about all sorts of advantages some evolution has granted to other animals like night-vision for example. Just because a lizard can do something we can’t is no reason to craft a theory about lizard superiority. To me, to dwell on the step-by-step evolution of the human eye as some high watermark of precision seems silly, especially because we lack night vision for example. Our neocortex has granted us vision across the complete light spectrum as was discussed in all of my previous posts about telescopes. My advice to the ID crowd would be to heed Shakespeare when he said “Thou protesteth too much”.
My final observation is our eye has a built-in blindspot! Seems to be a significant oversight for a “designer”.
To wrap up, here is a rather simplistic explanation of what happened on the road to a pretty good eye. Examples of animals with these evolutionary breakthroughs are provided for context, emphasis, and perhaps a little humility
FLATWORMS — a patch of light-sensitive cells that distinguish light from dark
GIANT CLAMS — those cells form a shallow cup but no lens — now input light direction can be assessed and understood angularly
ABALONE (one of my favorite kinds of seafood!) — the cells form a cup that rounds out and becomes a pinhole camera
EVERYTHING —mucus forms at the center of the rounded cup and would bend and begin to form basic images. This is varied throughout the animal kingdom as different proteins lead to a slightly different lens material
OCTOPUS — arguably one of the best eyes in our world — needs a lot of light because they live in the dark and their eyes can be ten inches across!
BIRDS — super soft lenses grant them great vision and in some applications telephoto lenses (EAGLES)
What is this sort of strange argument about? The need to present uncertain conjecture to undermine something that adds to our understanding of the world is hard to grasp for me. The remarkable story is all of this explanation is incomplete. The success story is mankind boosts devices the size of school buses (telescopes) into orbit and develops “vision” via instruments that mankind only recently realized even existed (radio waves, infrared, x-rays). Well-thought-out viewpoints need not stake their arguments as conjecture or finding a pocket watch on a country trail. In my recent post titled “Truth,” I tried to establish the basis between different sorts of truth.
The hard sciences have steadily for almost five hundred years have existed in the domain of objective truth. At times, there have been errors and dead ends and the scientific method attempts to refine such dead ends. There are so many unanswered questions yet to consider. There are also questions ill-suited to science to test and it is foolish for science to weigh in on such matters. A free society must be respectful of personal and even political truths that operate in a different domain, not subject to objective facts. All of this is okay. Trying to shoehorn a personal belief like “Mohammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse” in the context of amending aerodynamics and fluid dynamics is a fool’s errand. Be content to respect the faith of others without the “need” to interject your own.
I will end with my opinion. When people - not content with squandering their own opportunities for education - feel driven to sabotage the education of others, that is inexcusable and should be resisted with all force necessary. This is why I want science to be taught in science class.
Here’s a favorite song for the story. The eyes have it.
WHAT’S NEXT?
My next post is titled “We Like It Here”. The link is dead until posted. It is about living in flyover country.
I like this idea that you can teach anything as long as it’s in the right setting and context. Makes sense to me!
An interesting article. While I haven’t given it as much thought as you, I’m not convinced evolution is such a slam dunk for our origin. As a devout Christian I tend to follow the Bible understanding it has its holes we don’t understand also. But you raise good points. I’m not ready for a full debate. Just saying what I think. I like your writing as it makes me think harder than on other writings.