What good is half an eye?

Here is a random thought. A very popular creationist argument against the theory of evolution is in the form of the question, “what good is half an eye”? The idea behind this question aims to strike a blow at the process of incremental improvements that come about by random mutations during the process of evolution. The question (no doubt rhetorically posed) assumes the eye is useful only in its current functioning state and that a lesser form cannot be of any use. As is the case with any creationist argument, the thread of logic comes to a dead end here and the next statement is “therefore, there must have been an intelligent creator”. Richard Dawkins (in ‘The God Delusion’) argues that this question really has a good answer. Half an eye is definitely useful and is much better than no eye at all. Considering the most primitive eye with just a few receptor cells, an early life form could have detected the faint traces of the presence of a predator giving it a serious advantage over other life forms without such cells.

I think a simpler and more hands on way of answering this question is to pose it in the form of “Are current human ears useful?” The answer is an absolute yes. Yet, the human ear is certainly not the most advanced hearing organ. As everyone knows, bats have an amazingly complex hearing mechanism and dogs can hear a lot better than us. To put it pithily, when you hear a bear growl in the distance you avoid going in its direction helping you survive. You might not be able to judge accurately how far away it is from you or know whether or not it is running towards you based on Doppler shifting, but what you can figure out is good enough to avoid it. Compared to the more advanced ‘ears’ of the bats and dogs, one could easily consider the human ear as being just ‘half an ear’. Yet, it is a perfectly useful organ and lends itself heavily to our survival.

Walking further down this path of logic, it is easy to see that except the brain, almost every other organ in human beings is just ‘half an organ’. We are neither the fastest swimmers, nor the fastest runners, nor the strongest and we do not have the best sense of smell, sight or sound. Yet with all these ‘half organs’ we managed to survive and get on top of the food chain. The idea that what we currently have is the pinnacle of perfection that only an intelligent designer would have created and that anything less cannot be of any use is absurd to say the least.

I will now go back to finishing ‘Battlestar Galactica’.