2 HN users recommended this lecture2 months2013–2023score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN uses it as the go-to rebuttal to irreducible complexity, showing that even simple photoreceptors are useful and stages exist in living animals.
An excerpt from Richard Dawkins's lecture on Climbing Mount Improbable demonstrating how a complex eye can evolve through incremental steps. It answers the creationist irreducible complexity argument.
“Showing quite clearly how incremental beneficial change leads to the development of complex features.” (HN, 2023)
Actually the history of the eye has been farily well understood, and the various stages of its evolution can be seen in animals that exist today. Dawkins explains it: [this video]
Dawkins explains the stages of eye evolution seen in living animals.
Dawkins invalidating the notion that the eye is irreducably complex: [this video] . Showing quite clearly how incremental beneficial change leads to the development of complex features. But it will never matter to creationists: [link] . (Don't even bother with that last link.) They'll always just build another straw man.
Rebuts irreducible complexity of the eye via incremental change.
Just because something looks "engineered", doesn't mean it is. A perfect example is the eye. An organ of great complexity, but one that is very easily explained by logical evaluation, as well as existing living creatures and fossils: [this video] If you're a software engineer, I hope you understand how procedural systems and algorithms can transform data and functions. Similar processes take place via chemistry and biological interaction. Conway's Game of Life is a good example of a simple system giving rise to complex interaction and patterns. Complex beauty can arise from the interaction of systems, but if you say to yourself that it "must have been engineered by something greater than me", you settle in your mind, and shortcut around critical thinking and never progress toward understanding . And that's a great, great shame.
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