Sunday, August 19

Those Clever Trilobites


Imagine the Pre-Cambrian strata bereft of fossils (except for a few types of algae), then immediately, suddenly and shockingly the Cambrian explodes on top of it (but not always on top) with all sorts of highly developed, complex and complicated creatures, including the 'lowly' Trilobite.

There are no simple, non-complex animals in the Cambrian rock layers when evolutionary logic demands them. Why?

Let's look at the Trilobite (I'm capitalizing the word because of its unique importance). Supposedly 600 million years old according to evolutionist Norman Macbeth speaking at Harvard University in 1983, this little creature had extremely complex eyes. He said, "If you examine them closely, you will find that they are not simple animals. They are small, but they have an eye that has been discussed a great deal in recent years - an eye that is simply incredible.

[Still quoting]"It is made up of dozens of little tubes which are all at slightly different angles so that it covers the entire field of vision, with a different tube pointing at each spot on the horizon. But these tubes are all more complicated than that, by far. They have a [calcite] lens on them that is optically arranged in a very complicated way, and it is bound into another layer that has to be just exactly right for them to see anything . . . But the more complicated it is, the less likely it is simply to have grown up out of nothing.

[Still quoting]"And this situation has troubled everybody from the beginning [since learning about it] - to have everything at the very opening of the drama. The curtain goes up [life forms first appear in the Cambrian strata] and you have the players on the stage already, entirely in modern costumes." --- quoted in L.D. Sunderland's Darwin's Enigma (1988), p. 150.



The February 2, 1974 issue of Science News said the Trilobite had "the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature."

To top it off, we're not talking about a single lens in the eye-tube. There were TWO lenses. Evolutionist Riccardo Levi-Setti in Trilobites, 2nd ed., Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 54, 57 said this: "In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. And a final discovery - that the refracting interface between the two lense elements in a trilobite's eye was designed in accordance with optical constructions worked out by Descartes and Huygens in the mid-seventeenth century - borders on sheer science fiction ... The design of the trilobite's eye lens could well qualify for a patent disclosure."



So, let's see: Some mindless evolutionary force used chance and trial and error to develop a simple Trilobite light-sensitive lobe, then later a simple eye, then later a single lens Trilobite eye, then later (we're talking the mandatory millions and millions of years here) adding a tube for that eye, then later adding a calcite lens, then later adding a second lens because the first one couldn't focus, then later adding more tubes with more lenses, then having optimized the process leaving it at that. That's some doing when we're talking about a force energized by chance mutations.

And where are all the trial and error fossils that led to that 'incredible' eye? There ain't any. And there ain't any because there never were any.

Saturday, August 11

Watch-O-Rama

Another baking project produced an exquisitely designed blueberry pie, ready for . . . neither baking nor eating --- it was the PlayDough variety. Never one to just sit and do nothing, this little one is a doer, a model task-mistress and busybody (in the good sense). We're happy to have her around.

I watched her for a few hours today as Barb went to visit Liz at the hospital, while Liz was waiting for Ryan's emergency surgery on his appendix. Everything was successful, thankfully, so far. No insurance, though.

So I watched and mowed and watched and fixed the creaking bottom bracket on my bike, and watched and watered in the backyard, and watched some more. She was playing with the next door kids out front. Only had to yell at her a few times!

Yes, God is watching us and lovingly yelling at us when we goof up. It hurts and feels good at the same time.