Why You Might Have to Choose Between Science and Faith

[Deep13]

165. Well, that and selection by the environment.

Mutation and selection is pretty much the entire explanation. There really is no other possibility.

It's wasteful because it takes thousands of failures that die off for every mutation that actually aids survival. We look around and see the success stories. We do not see the mountains of failures. Also, evolution has no way to correct mistakes. For example, our eyes are built backwards. Nerves and blood vessels on the retina between it and the lens means we should see them as blank spots and lines everytime we look at anything. A purposeful designer would simply redo the design to put that stuff behind the retina. But, that takes planning with a specific goal in mind, something natural selection cannot do. So we evolved a huge visual cortex to extrapolate the missing data from the image on the unobstructed parts of the retina and fill in the blanks. So a small amount of what we see at any given moment is literally hallucination. And that just one example from one organ of one animal.