My criticisms of the creationist claims against the evolution of the eye have been rebutted!


Oh, whatever shall I do now?

cameraeye

I wonder where I can buy that impressive 15 pixel camera, and how much it costs? I’m thinking it’s got to be a 4×4 array, with just one dead pixel.

You know, maybe some people shouldn’t even try to make these graphical memes.

Comments

  1. jaybee says

    Counter meme:

    Picture 1: show an ornate wooden baluster “this was planned and created”

    Picture 2: show a complex tangle of sticks which jammed up and formed a dam after a flood. “therefore this was also carefully planned and created”

  2. kevinalexander says

    There are technical advances. Before the Fall, they just had a monkey in a box drawing what he saw.

  3. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    The 574 pixel retina is 41X14. An rather odd ratio.
    According to the Wiki article:

    In adult humans, the entire retina is approximately 72% of a sphere about 22 mm in diameter. The entire retina contains about 7 million cones and 75 to 150 million rods.

    Something doesn’t add up.

  4. Larry says

    If the eye’s creator is so smart, tell me how ya gonna focus an image on the retina when the lens is orthogonal to it?

  5. rietpluim says

    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand… the good ol’ watch maker argument strikes again!

    And fails miserably.

  6. says

    I’m surprised that PZ didn’t point out that god did better designing Cephalopod eyes, and must, therefore, like them better than us. :-(

  7. prae says

    Creationists having only 574 photoreceptors per eye would at least explain the quality of that picture…

  8. Saganite, a haunter of demons says

    You know, we now have retina chips that can be implanted into the eye that already have 1500 pixels of resolution and more. Presumably, that means we are superior to that god who can only get us a measly 574.

  9. komarov says

    To be fair, with all those compression artifacts that picture does look very accidental. That’s probably where the 574 came from: the maker just counted blobs in the eye.
    There is also a strong case to be made against the designed eye: no standard connectors. Cameras come with USB, Ethernet or more specialised video connectors, but good luck trying to link your eyesight to your computer. Brain electrodes are hardly plug and play and I have no idea where you’d source the drivers from.
    Finally, just how big is the digital camera? If it was a standard small camera, a few centimetres on each side, those would be giant pixels. Or perhaps it’s a genuine James Bond pinhead spycam from the late 60s. That would explain the resolution and why nobody complained about it: it was highly advanced, classified spy gear.* And ficitonal.

    *”Look how shiny the three forehead pixels are. Clearly this man is bald. I think we’ve found Blofeld…”

  10. blf says

    I have to wonder if “they” even have a vague idea what a “pixel” is?

    3W × 5H isn’t even sensible for a US-ASCII dot-matrix glyph, and is only slightly more expressive than a 7-segment LED display.

  11. Lofty says

    Energy gradients are powerful sorting tools and given enough time can build many impressive arrangements of matter.

  12. leftwingfox says

    Given the blockiness of the jpeg compression artifacts, I’m suspecting Poe’s law here. There’s a sort of fractal wrongness about this that makes me suspect this was intentional parody.

  13. Menyambal says

    Yeah, that’s just stupid. No plural on atheist, either. If it is a poe, it’s a lame one.

    The camera at least has the light sensors oriented toward the incoming light. The eye has them in backwards.

  14. IngisKahn says

    So they meant mega pixels of course – the 574 number comes from our entire field of vision – but that’s cheating. If you just take what the eye can immediately see, it’s more like 8 megapixels of a very shitty image that is mostly blurry and black and white with many distortions and blind spots. Our brains do a lot of image processing to make it seem like we can see well :)

  15. antaresrichard says

    The LaVision Imager LX PIV Camera shown in the meme touts a resolution of up to 29 million pixels.

    ;-)

  16. Sven says

    To all atheist

    Why do all these dimwits think the plural of “atheist” is “atheist”?

  17. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re 22:
    obviously they think it is like the plural of fish, which is formally “fish” and casually “fishes”. (or, I’m sure in their mind, sheep is their more common simile for atheist)
    —————-
    aside from that; simply lack of imagination assumes everything only comes from conscious design. very many incremental improvements they find impossible to imagine. Long-time and sample size is what allows statistical improvement to a fine implement from a crude first draft. It is hard to visualize large numbers, numbers so large that even “large” is “minuscule” effectively.

  18. Ragutis says

    There are technical advances. Before the Fall, they just had a monkey in a box drawing what he saw.

    Clearly you haven’t seen the documentary series The Flintstones. It’s a bird, not a monkey.

  19. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Have they explained why their Creator left a blind spot (due to the optic nerve) in each of our eyes that plenty of other creatures with equally complicated eyes lack? Or how about the significant chromatic aberration inherent in the eye design which means everything off the centre axis is always somewhat blurry. Or the fact a huge portion of people need corrective lenses in order to see clearly because their eyes can’t sufficiently correct for certain eyeball shape variations.

    Seems like a pretty incompetent creator to me, especially since most of these Creators are described as omnipotent and omniscient.

  20. numerobis says

    One trick for early robotics was to reduce the camera to 32×32 in hardware — by smearing vaseline on the lens. The cameras back then had far higher resolution, but the computers couldn’t process all the pixels carefully, so instead they smeared the lens and just processed a few of the pixels.

    I wonder if there’s a natural analogue of that anywhere — a sensor that was too expensive to bother with, so the nervous system gave up on it. I guess Shubin mentions noses.

  21. Muz says

    On the subject of eye evolution, can anyone point to a good description of the stages?
    Most of the ones you find usually stop at 4: light sensitive skin forms a dent; dent gets deeper; dent closes over to form maybe an iris, possibly with a lens; cut to- complex human eye.

    That last one is a pretty big jump. A sort of pore shaped structure, even with a lens, is one thing. A self actuating ball/gland in a socket, with a covering (or two) and lubrication system, with internal and separately adjustable iris and lens is vastly more complicated.

    I’ve wondering if there’s a good descriptions of the stages (or theories thereof) that I can wave at people as the one found in many biol books and web sites it pretty weak and would seem like an insult to the intelligence of any creationist “eye skeptic” worth their salt.

  22. blf says

    To all atheist

    Why do all these dimwits think the plural of “atheist” is “atheist”?

    It was supposed to be To Al the atheist, but they got confused by all those extra letters.

    (I have no idea who Al “the atheist” is, but presume he(presumably) once mentioned a complicated word like “pixel” to some dimwits…)

  23. eternalstudent says

    @29 Muz: Check out “The Eye – A Very Short Introduction” by Michael F. Land (Oxford University Press). It’s a fascinating description of the evolution of the eye in all its variations (something like 6 distinct types can be found today [this post is making me think it’s time to reread it]). It’s very readable even by a non-biologist. And available as an e-book from Amazon.

  24. says

    @11 prae

    Creationists having only 574 photoreceptors per eye would at least explain the quality of that picture…

    It definitely explains their limited view of reality.

  25. birgerjohansson says

    The plural for pixel is “pixel”… except when it is “pixels”….
    A nd who is Al Latheist?

  26. John Morales says

    Easy enough to translate charitably:

    <To all atheist[s] – a camera known to be created is to an eye as is 15 pixels to 574 pixels!>

  27. bcwebb says

    Just wanted to point out that all you atheoili (clearly the correct plural of atheist) can’t read a simple diagram – if the 2/3 of the eye shown has 574 pixels then clearly the entire eye has 861 pixels. Now, lets compare SAT scores.

    I also what to point out the creationist was just trying to be inclusive, since most men’s cameras are in Mpixels then women’s cameras must be in S-pixels (or S/P pixels in Canada.) Trump’s cam must be in XXL or Huge-pixels. It’s all very simple.

    And shouldn’t the plural of pixel be pixie?

  28. Ichthyic says

    Have they explained why their Creator left a blind spot…

    yes. you simply aren’t Jesusing hard enough.

  29. Ichthyic says

    obviously they think it is like the plural of fish, which is formally “fish” and casually “fishes”

    nope.

    speaking as an ichthyologist, I can assure you that the plural of fish is fish only when you are speaking of a group of the same species.

    when you are speaking of group(s) of different species, it then becomes fishes.

    so..

    “A school of pacific mackerel” would be generalized as “A school of fish”

    while

    “A feeding frenzy of sharks, tuna, and billfishes*” would be generalized as “A feeding frenzy of fishes”

    *I even included a plural of multiple species, in a sentence describing multiple species.. aren’t I clever!

    no seriously. this IS the way the plural is used.