Author’s note: This is Part Three in a series of conversations with Stuart Burgess, author of Ultimate Engineering: An Engineer Investigates the Biomechanics of the Human Body.
Q. Continuing, anatomist Lucy Hyde, your colleague at Bristol University, writes for The Conversation that the human eye reflects “evolutionary compromise” because the retina is “wired backwards.” But the known explanation of this feature of the eye goes back at least ten years.
A. You’re correct. I mentioned in my book that in 2015 an article in Scientific American reported on the scientific discovery that the human eye was not wired backwards as previously thought. So from 2015 it was well publicized that the eye did not have a design fault in its wiring. It is quite surprising that evolutionists like Lucy Hyde are making the same false claim today on platforms like The Conversation.
Evolutionary Scientists Lagging Behind
Q. In your book, you explain this feature of the eye by building on the insights of intelligent design proponent Jonathan Wells in his 2017 book Zombie Science. Not only is it not a design flaw, but you say the wiring actually reflects “design strength on multiple levels.” How so?
A. Researchers at Leipzig University discovered these amazing glial cells in the retina that act like fiber-optic cables. Lucy Hyde is assuming that light is degrading as it goes through the retina, hence the idea that it’s supposedly wired backwards. But these researchers from Leipzig found that light is not degraded as it goes through the retina because it’s guided by the glial cells. Not only is the light not degraded, but these cells actually improve the signal. For example, the glial cells increase image sharpness. So what was previously thought to be a design weakness, turns out to be a design strength. The scientists were stunned. Each fiber-optic cable is optimized to the type of color cell it’s going to. Not only are there fiber-optic cables to guide the light, but they’re even individually fine-tuned.
Nathan Lents made the same false claim of backwards wiring in his book Human Errors, which was published in 2018, three years after the Scientific American article. Abby Hafer is another evolutionist to make the same false claim in her book, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer, which was published in November 2015, well after the Scientific American article came out. This illustrates how a false scientific idea can take a long time to get corrected in popular literature.
Q. The tropes lumber on, as Jonathan Wells said, like zombies.
A. It shows what happens if you look through the lens of evolution. With that worldview, you’re expecting bad design, you’re predicting bad design, you assume bad design, and you then tell people it’s bad design, even though it’s not a bad design.
Embarrassing Academic Rigor
The eye is one of the most striking embarrassing examples of claimed bad design by evolutionists. Science writer David Coppedge at Discovery Institute’s Science and Culture Today highlighted a paper published in 2022 (see here and here) by a UK professor of neuroscience who argues that the eye is near to perfect. He points out the fact that people are still saying, wrongly, that it’s wired backwards. So this is another example of poor academic rigor.
Ironically, The Conversation, this platform, claims to be academically rigorous. It’s one of the first things they claim.
Q. At a minimum, that’s journalistic sloppiness and multiple failures to do due diligence.
A. For evolution, there often seems to be different standards of academic rigor. If you write on evolution, you have license to say almost anything regardless of the scientific evidence. You could not do that with any other subject.