Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells

Author:Jonathan Wells [Wells, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936599462
Publisher: Discovery Institute Press
Published: 2017-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

But Nilsson and Pelger had done nothing of the sort. They started out with a series of eight drawings to represent what they believed had been the course of eye evolution. (Their eight published drawings were different from the ten drawings used by Dawkins in his 1991 lecture.) The first drawing was of a flat circular patch of light-sensing cells sandwiched between a transparent protective layer and a layer of dark pigment. The last was of a camera eye, and the other six drawings were hypothetical intermediates between those two.

Biologically, the drawings were quite unrealistic. First, they were two-dimensional, not three-dimensional like real eyes. Second, they ignored all the other changes that would have to accompany the deformation of a flat patch, such as modifications in head anatomy and nerve connections. Third (and most significantly), they assumed the steady, unidirectional evolution of a light-sensing patch into a camera eye without any random variations, delays, or deviations from the predetermined path. There was no selection against harmful mutations, because no harmful mutations were permitted. So the drawings did not really illustrate evolution, which is not unidirectional and has no endpoint in mind. Contrary to Dawkins’s claim, Nilsson and Pelger did not “let their model deform itself at random,” nor did they watch as “the shape of the model eye deformed itself on the computer screen.” They just drew some figures that they decided beforehand represented evolutionary intermediates between simple and complex eyes. If anything, the drawings represented intelligent design,22 though of course design much less sophisticated than actual eyes, primitive or otherwise.

According to Nilsson and Pelger, they measured four parameters in their drawings: the length of straight structures, the arc length of curved structures, and the height and width of the two-dimensional cup formed by the rounding up of the layers. Assuming a series of one percent changes in each of these four parameters (each change moving unerringly in the direction of forming a camera eye), they estimated the number of steps it would take for the first of their drawings to become the second, the second to become the third, and so on. Then they added up the numbers they had gotten and concluded that “1829 steps of 1% are needed for the entire model sequence.”23 Combining this with some assumptions about variability, heritability, selection, and generation time, Nilsson and Pelger calculated that a camera eye could easily evolve in about 364,000 years. They concluded, “It is obvious that the eye was never a real threat to Darwin’s theory of evolution.”24

Nilsson and Pelger’s calculations gave the illusion that they had quantified a natural evolutionary process. But all they had really done was produce some imaginative drawings and make some measurements of them. Their “model” consisted solely of their drawings, which were not based on any calculations at all.

So in what sense did Nilsson and Pelger create a “computer model”? None at all. A computer model is a program that simulates as realistically as possible something that has happened, might have happened, or might happen in the future.

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