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Hagfish overturn eye evolution theory?

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Pacific hagfish Myxine.jpg From ScienceDaily:

New research led by the University of Leicester has overturned a long-standing theory on how vertebrates evolved their eyes by identifying remarkable details of the retina in the eyes of 300 million year-old lamprey and hagfish fossils.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, led by Professor Sarah Gabbott from the University of Leicester Department of Geology, shows that fossil hagfish eyes were well-developed, indicating that the ancient animal could see, whereas their living counterparts are completely blind after millions of years of eye degeneration — a kind of reverse evolution.

No problem. It is called devolution.

But now the fun starts:

The eye is a complex structure and must have evolved through small step-by-step changes but these are not recorded in living animals and until now it was thought that these anatomical details could not be preserved in fossils.More. (public access) – Sarah E. Gabbott, Philip C. J. Donoghue, Robert S. Sansom, Jakob Vinther, Andrei Dolocan, Mark A. Purnell. Pigmented anatomy in Carboniferous cyclostomes and the evolution of the vertebrate eye. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016; 283 (1836): 20161151 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.1151

The eye absolutely did not evolve by small step-by-step changes.  This study only shows how the eye can devolve.

Darwinism = millstone on public payroll.

See also: Devolution: Getting back to the simple life

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Comments
This:
fossil hagfish eyes were well-developed, indicating that the ancient animal could see, whereas their living counterparts are completely blind after millions of years of eye degeneration — a kind of reverse evolution.
Reminds me of this:
Complex Arthropod Eyes Found in Early Cambrian - June 2011 Excerpt: Complex eyes with modern optics from an unknown arthropod, more complex than trilobite eyes, have been discovered in early Cambrian strata from southern Australia.,,, Here we report exceptionally preserved fossil eyes from the Early Cambrian (~515 million years ago) Emu Bay Shale of South Australia, revealing that some of the earliest arthropods possessed highly advanced compound eyes, each with over 3,000 large ommatidial lenses and a specialized ‘bright zone’. These are the oldest non-biomineralized eyes known in such detail, with preservation quality exceeding that found in the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang deposits. Non-biomineralized eyes of similar complexity are otherwise unknown until about 85 million years later. The arrangement and size of the lenses indicate that these eyes belonged to an active predator that was capable of seeing in low light. The eyes are more complex than those known from contemporaneous trilobites and are as advanced as those of many living forms. They provide further evidence that the Cambrian explosion involved rapid innovation in fine-scale anatomy as well as gross morphology, http://crev.info/content/110629-complex_arthropod_eyes_found_in_early_cambrian 500 million-year-old super predator had remarkable vision - Dec 07, 2011 Excerpt: The fossils represent compound eyes - the multi-faceted variety seen in arthropods such as flies, crabs and kin - and are amongst the largest to have ever existed, with each eye up to 3 cm in length and containing over 16,000 lenses. The number of lenses and other aspects of their optical design suggest that Anomalocaris would have seen its world with exceptional clarity whilst hunting in well-lit waters. Only a few arthropods, such as modern predatory dragonflies, have similar resolution. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-million-year-old-super-predator-remarkable-vision.html Ancient creature’s surprising sight - November 2011 Excerpt: The fossilized compound eyes of a crustacean that lived around half a billion years ago reveal a surprisingly sophisticated visual system that was probably able to detect motion and gauge distance in many directions. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7373/full/479270d.html
A few more notes as to eyes:
“The reason evolutionary biologists believe in "40 known independent eye evolutions" isn't because they've reconstructed those evolutionary pathways, but because eyes don't assume a treelike pattern on the famous Darwinian "tree of life." Darwinists are accordingly forced, again and again, to invoke convergent "independent" evolution of eyes to explain why eyes are distributed in such a non-tree-like fashion. This is hardly evidence against ID. In fact the appearance of eyes within widely disparate groups speaks eloquently of common design. Eyes are a problem, all right -- for Darwinism.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/03/its_a_shame_rea083441.html “Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming into existence of complicated, apparently designed objects, like eyes. For if it is not gradual in these cases, it ceases to have any explanatory power at all. Without gradualness in these cases, we are back to miracle, which is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation.” Dawkins, R. (1995) River Out of Eden, Basic Books, New York, p. 83. On Darwin’s Birthday Big Fossil Find Deepens His Dilemma, says New York Times Bestselling Author of Darwin’s Doubt - Feb. 12, 2014 Excerpt: All the animals are complex at their first appearance. The first trilobite is 100% trilobite, complete with jointed appendages, eyes, and internal organs. No “pre-trilobites” or “half-trilobites” are found. The same is true for all the other animals discovered there. http://www.discovery.org/a/22571 Study suggests humans can detect even the smallest units of light - July 21, 2016 Excerpt: Research,, has shown that humans can detect the presence of a single photon, the smallest measurable unit of light. Previous studies had established that human subjects acclimated to the dark were capable only of reporting flashes of five to seven photons.,,, it is remarkable: a photon, the smallest physical entity with quantum properties of which light consists, is interacting with a biological system consisting of billions of cells, all in a warm and wet environment," says Vaziri. "The response that the photon generates survives all the way to the level of our awareness despite the ubiquitous background noise. Any man-made detector would need to be cooled and isolated from noise to behave the same way.",,, The gathered data from more than 30,000 trials demonstrated that humans can indeed detect a single photon incident on their eye with a probability significantly above chance. "What we want to know next is how does a biological system achieve such sensitivity? How does it achieve this in the presence of noise? http://phys.org/news/2016-07-humans-smallest.html William Bialek: More Perfect Than We Imagined - March 23, 2013 Excerpt: photoreceptor cells that carpet the retinal tissue of the eye and respond to light, are not just good or great or phabulous at their job. They are not merely exceptionally impressive by the standards of biology, with whatever slop and wiggle room the animate category implies. Photoreceptors operate at the outermost boundary allowed by the laws of physics, which means they are as good as they can be, period. Each one is designed to detect and respond to single photons of light — the smallest possible packages in which light comes wrapped. “Light is quantized, and you can’t count half a photon,” said William Bialek, a professor of physics and integrative genomics at Princeton University. “This is as far as it goes.” … http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2013/03/william-bialek-more-perfect-than-we.html the inverted retina, which evolutionists insisted was "bad design", is now found to be 'optimal' design: Retinal Glial Cells Enhance Human Vision Acuity A. M. Labin and E. N. Ribak Physical Review Letters, 104, 158102 (April 2010) Excerpt: The retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20482021 Fiber optic light pipes in the retina do much more than simple image transfer - Jul 21, 2014 Excerpt: Having the photoreceptors at the back of the retina is not a design constraint, it is a design feature. The idea that the vertebrate eye, like a traditional front-illuminated camera, might have been improved somehow if it had only been able to orient its wiring behind the photoreceptor layer, like a cephalopod, is folly.,,, The idea that these Müller cells act as living fiber optic cables has been floated previously. It has even been convincingly demonstrated using a dual beam laser trap.,,, ,,,In the retina, and indeed the larger light organ that is the eye, there is much more going on than just photons striking rhodopsin photopigments. As far as absorbers, there are all kinds of things going on in there—various carontenoids, lipofuscins and lipochromes, even cytochrome oxidases in mitochondria that get involved at the longer wavelegnths.,,, ,,In considering not just the classical photoreceptors but the entire retina itself as a light-harvesting engine,,, that can completely refigure (its) fine structure within a few minutes to handle changing light levels, every synapse appears as an essential machine that percolates information as if at the Brownian scale, or even below.,,, http://phys.org/news/2014-07-fiber-optic-pipes-retina-simple.html
bornagain77
August 4, 2016
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