Cambrian Shrimp Eyes Surprising Advanced

Cambrian Shrimp Eyes Are ‘Surprisingly Advanced’ [Excerpts]

Dragonflies dart with exceeding dexterity as they avoid obstacles and prey on other flying insects. This is made possible by the accuracy with which their eyes allow them to perceive their surroundings.

In fact, arthropods such as dragonflies and shrimp have some of the best optical equipment in the known world (Thomas, B. Shrimp Eye May Inspire New DVD Technology. ICR News. Posted on icr.org November 4, 2009, accessed July 6, 2011). If these advanced visual systems resulted from millions of years of evolutionary trial and error, one would expect to see a progression of simple-to-complicated eyes in fossils ascending earth's rock layers. But fully formed, advanced compound eyes have now been discovered on Australia's Kangaroo Island among Cambrian fossils—far too early to fit the evolutionary story.

A University of Adelaide online video described the Cambrian compound eye as "surprisingly advanced in many respects. It shows that primitive creatures rapidly evolved powerful vision during the 'Cambrian explosion.'" This "explosion" refers to the sudden appearance of representatives from every single animal phylum—alive or extinct—in the lowermost fossil-bearing Cambrian rocks, which evolutionists insist were deposited over 500 million years ago. But is "rapid evolution" really what this fossil shows?

The fossil compound eye the researchers examined, the most advanced yet discovered in Cambrian fossils, had over 3,000 lenses. It was compared, both in a University of Adelaide press release and the accompanying video, with the eyes of robber fly insects, which have excellent motion-detecting vision that enables them to hunt in flight.

Reams of genetic information are required to construct compound eyes like those found in these fossils, and each bit of genetic information is supposed to have been generated by a lucky mutation. The problem is that according to the calculations performed by evolutionary researchers, 216 million years are needed to acquire just two coordinated mutations in sequence, at least in humans (Durrett, R. and D. Schmidt. 2008. Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution. Genetics. 180 (3): 1501-1509.). Compound eyes needed thousands of coordinated mutations to have occurred in only 30 million years. In essence, evolutionists have refuted their own story.

The assertion that these eyes are the result of "evolutionary innovation" is clearly false. The alternative is that they were created. Advanced eyes in Cambrian fossils are no surprise to Bible-believers, who understand that God made shrimp with fully formed eyes from the beginning.

http://www.icr.org/article/6239/