Blinded Eyes of Evolution

It's fascinating and even fun to see the intricacy of God's handiwork and beauty he's provided. But he also made some things that are dreadfully ugly — and least by human standards. At least they find each other attractive. One of these is called the hagfish, and it's blind. The hagfish doesn't seem to mind lack of vision, it can get along right well. It's cousin the lamprey can see. And no, neither one of them are eels, they just look like them.

Two similar fish, one is blind, one has sight. Proponents of minerals-to-moray evolution claim that the hagfish's blindness is an intermediate state of eye evolution, but fossils filleted that idea: hagfish fossils show eyes just as developed as lamprey eyes. This wrecks one aspect of evolutionary storytelling, but they have can say the magic words, (in this case, "Convergent evolution") and bada bing, they have their rescuing device. Sorta. No evidence for what happened (or didn't happen) in the distant past, that's superfluous. I reckon that folks who give credence to magical evolutionary fantasies are as blind as the hagfish.

What can a creature’s eyes tell us? How about where it ranks on the evolutionary scale? Until recently the hagfish was seen as a living example of an intermediate form in the stepwise evolution of eyes. Its blind eyes with sightless retinas lack image-forming essentials like a lens, iris, and melanin pigment as well as muscles for eye movement. The eyes can even be buried beneath its skin! The hagfish was therefore thought to have less evolved eyes than its creepy cousin the lamprey, which has a sophisticated camera-type eye. Together these jawless fish were thought to speak volumes about the evolutionary history of the vertebrate eye.

To read the entire article, feast your eyes on "Discovery of Hagfish Eyes Debunks Claim About Eye Evolution". 


  For lyrics to "Blinded Eyes" by Petra, click here.  



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