Be grateful for your eyes' flawless design once more.

Look: On Thanksgiving, Be Grateful for the Intelligent Design of Your Eyes

David Klinghoffer 

Happy Thanksgiving! If you’re looking for one more thing to express gratitude for, look no further than…eyes. As engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman write in their new book, Your Designed Body: 

Our eyes differentiate the nuances across an amazing spectrum of colors. The same eyes that work in painfully bright light can also see in almost total darkness. How do they turn light (photons) into information (electrical impulses), and how does our brain turn that into images? 

Eyes were quite the sudden, unanticipated gift in the history of life. Charles Darwin expected that they must have developed from simple forerunners through the usual (hypothesized) series of gradual steps. But at the Cambrian explosion some 530 million years ago, we find clear evidence of both compound (as in the trilobite pictured above) and camera eyes already in use by creatures among the first animals in the fossil record. BOOM: There they are. 

An Evolutionary Icon 

We take our own eyes for granted. However, our ability to interact with the world through vision — its beauty, its marvels, the information all around us — is beyond remarkable. At the same time, the eyes are an evolutionary icon, in two senses. In a powerful short video written and directed by Rachel Adams, we consider the scientific evidence around the question of eye evolution: 

To deal with and demote the exquisite sensitivity of our vision — the ability to detect a single photon — Darwinists claim that vertebrate eyes are built backwards in testimony to the haphazard ways of evolution. But as Discovery Institute biologist Jonathan Wells explains, evolutionists are working with outdated science. It’s not ID proponents, but entirely mainstream research, that increasingly reveals the optimal design of our eyes.

Don’t let the truth about life and its origins get canceled. If, like me, you are grateful for the courageous voices of Dr. Wells and other scientists with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, please take a moment now to donate to keep Evolution News — the daily voice of the intelligent design research community — going strong in 2023!