It is commonly believed that Dr. Dan-Eric Nilsson and Dr. Susanne Pelger of Lund University in Sweden demonstrated in a scientific paper written back in 1994 that a fully-developed vertebrate eye could have developed from a simple light-sensitive spot by a process of unguided natural selection, in “less than 364,000 years.” That, at any rate, is the popular myth. What’s the reality? Nilsson and Pelger certainly made a convincing case for gradualism in their paper, but they failed to bolster the case for Darwinism. Looking at the eye from a purely anatomical standpoint, they showed how a vertebrate eye could have developed from a patch of light-sensitive skin by the accumulation of numerous tiny modifications over the course of time … Continue reading Could the eye have evolved by natural selection in a geological blink?