A problem for evolution has been the fact that all parts of such organs have to work together for sight, hearing or thinking to take place. Such organs would have been useless until all the individual parts were completed. So the question arises: Could the undirected element of chance that is thought to be a driving force of evolution have brought all these parts together at the right time to produce such elaborate mechanisms?

12. (a) How did Darwin comment on the origin of the eye? (b) Is the problem nearer to being solved today?

¹² Darwin acknowledged this as a problem. For example, he wrote: “To suppose that the eye . . . could have been formed by [evolution], seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”⁠⁹ More than a century has passed since then. Has the problem been solved? No. On the contrary, since Darwin’s time what has been learned about the eye shows that it is even more complex than he understood it to be. Thus Jastrow said: “The eye appears to have been designed; no designer of telescopes could have done better.”⁠¹⁰

“Instead, they have developed a profound new respect for the sophistication of human sight. . . . The human retina is the envy of computer scientists. Its 100 million rods and cones and its layers of neurons perform at least 10 billion calculations per second.”⁠^b