Pogonophora "eye"?

For many years I carried 3 x 5 cards in my shirt pocket so I could jot down things I wanted to remember or explore.  I just came across the following one recently; it was tucked in with some other paper's.  Read as follows.

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1/16/2003  Jan 16, 2003  JGE idea

1   Pogonophora "eye" as possible intermediate in having retina reverse molluscan condition

2   Pogonophora (nearly) "straight line" in evolutionary tree with Pre-Cambrian divergences of other groups at various Post-extinction events

3   TATA box distribution

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On the back of the card I had only a black spot and an x spaced about two inches apart.  the spot and the x are a simple device to demonstrate our blind spot where the optic nerve goes through the retina.  By closing one eye and looking at one mark about six to ten inches in front of your open eye and maneuvering the card until the other mark disappears in the blind spot when the brain fills in the void,

If the x in on the right and I look at it with my left eye, the dot disappears about six inches from my eye when the marks are almost horizontal.

The squid eye does not have a blind spot because the nerve fibers from the retina lie behind the light sensitive retinal cells.  All vertebrate eyes presumably have a blind spot because the nerve fibers from the retina run over the retina until they form the beginning of the optic nerve as they pass through the retina.  There, the blind spot is not apparent to us because the other eye fills out the image in the brain.

The Pogonophora must have retained enough of the eye genes to provide a base for rebuilding the eye.  But the inversion as compared to the annelid, mollusk, arthropod line made the light sensitive retinal cells and the nerve fibers reversed in position.

TATA box things would be worth examining if you are a molecular biologist looking for answers to some related evolutionary steps.

Pineda et al., 2000, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 97:4525-4529, say "previously demonstrated expression of Pax-6 in planarian eyes, suggest that the same basic gene regulatory circuit required for eye development in Drosophila and mouse is used in the prototypic eye spots of Platyhelminthes and, therefore, is truly conserved during evolution."

Joseph Engemann   Emeritus Professor of Biology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan    May 24, 2019

EVOLUTION

The Error of Irreducible Complexity

FALSE SCIENTIFIC CREATIONISM ARGUMENTS

Irreducible complexity is probably the most believable of the error filled arguments of "scientific creationists."  Their attempts to credit the stories of creation found in the Bible with factual scientific truth impede others from seeing the grandeur of creation with one single creative burst giving rise to the universe and ultimately the process of evolution by which life came to exist.

Darwin's Black Box, a 1996 book by Michael Behe defines "irreducibly complex" as "a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."

Darwin himself provided the argument in Chapter Six of his The Origin of Species entitled "Difficulties of the Theory".  Darwin's first sentence of a sub-section "Organs of extreme perfection and Complication" reads as follows.

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

Why the seeming absurdity may not be absurd is discussed for three pages before the sub-section concludes with the following sentence.

"Let this process go on for millions of years, and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?"

In the century and a half since Darwin presented that view, morphological and molecular evidence has accumulated that make it easier for informed biologists to understand major steps of the process.  The basic ultrastructure of the eye's retina associated with derivatives of cilia probably began with light sensitive spots on roots of cilia or flagella enabling photosynthetic flagellates to give a directional response to light when shaded by an associated pigment granule.

Most of the above is found in chapter two of my 2010 Evolution Insights manuscript which includes the following statement.

"The fact that an eye cannot function well with an essential part removed does not mean that it could not evolve gradually from one that did not have that part.  Because God did create it, either by the evolutionary process or by some more recent creative event should be answered by the facts if such exist.  Those believing in God as their creator should stop to think that God is the creator of all things either directly or by the natural processes of the one created world.  The consequence of that, a world behaving according to God's laws, is that there is truth in the correct interpretation of the evidence the world presents."

Joseph G. Engemann     September 15, 2014