Wednesday, November 07, 2007

The origin of the eye? According to a story in the Seattle Times:

Scientists have traced the origin of eyes back to a transparent blob of living jelly floating in the sea about 600 million years ago.

That creature, the distant ancestor of a modern freshwater animal known as a hydra, could only distinguish light from dark.

But that was such an advantage that it was passed on from generation to generation of the hydra's cousins and their myriad descendants. It was the precursor of the wildly different, ever more complex eyes of fish, ants, flies, giraffes and people.


Much ID literature is geared toward the premise that the complex, compound eye could not have arisen by evolutionary means. This clearly flies in the face of that. I will be curious to see what the reaction to this story is.

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