The journal Evolution: Education and Outreach has posted, online, free, an entire issue on the evolution of the eye. The eye is one of those sticking points in the ongoing debate with antievolutionists. Its complexity, its improbability, its seeming miraculous advent seems to point directly to interventionist manifestation.
Admittedly, it is a difficult subject, and sometimes even after having it explained and explained well, the details easily slip away from concrete grasp, like some rarefied example of tensor analysis that anyone but a professional mathematician finds a bit sleight-of-handish.
The debate rages because of a tactical insistence on the part of the antiscience crowd that any supposed gap in our understanding must automatically make special creation the answer. A gap can’t simply be a gap, pending further investigation and future understanding, it must be filled. This is a species, I suppose, of “nature abhoring a vacuum,” but it really has nothing to do with nature other than human nature in be obtuse, often virulently panic-driven, and obdurate in the face of change. (One wonders about the vacuum between the ears of said counterclaimants, but that’s just being snarky, I suppose.)
In any event, peruse the articles. The research is fascinating, the articles cover a large range of topics under the theme, and for any but the most obstinately reactionary it is a thorough response.
