pansycub asked: can I ask the significance of your six eyed spook fish tattoo? :)
I got it in protest against the creationist argument that “the human eye is too complex to have evolved.”
This section from Julia Sweeney’s monologue Letting Go of God sums up my feelings on this subject pretty nicely:
“I was dating a guy who was a big believer in Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is an idea that the world is so complex, and especially the conscious, thinking, feeling human being, who is so complicated, that it couldn’t’ have happened by chance. Someone or something even smarter had to have a hand in creating us. And that someone or something is God. The watch requires a watchmaker. One morning my Intelligent Designer boyfriend and I woke up and he glanced at the books on the table next to my side of the bed, which were becoming increasingly more biological rather than religious. Then we gazed into each other’s eyes, deeper than ever before. Ah…. He said, “It’s the human eye you know, that’s the proof that there must have been a designer. You can’t have half an eye. Half an eye is no good at all. You either have an eye so you can see or you don’t. How could you possibly evolve an eye?” “Yes,” I said, “That’s probably true. An eye, an eye is very complex, After all, it’s the window of the soul.” So I began to read about eyes. I learned a lot more than I ever dreamed about eyes. It turns out that from an evolutionary perspective, the human eye is perfectly explainable. What began as a patch of skin, more sensitive to light than other skin offers some advantage, those that have it, live. Those that don’t, do not. So, half an eye is pretty valuable, about half as valuable. Now if an intelligent designer, or God, designed our eyes, well, he would not get such a good grade. Because he put the blood vessels and the nerves that carry the visual information to the brain on top of our retina. Imagine! That’s like putting the wiring of a video camera on top of the lens. And where the blood vessels and nerves go through the retina into our brain, it causes this blind spot that we have to compensate for by basically hallucinating. That’s bad. Bad, bad, bad. Not the best design for an eye. AND it doesn’t even have to be that way! Octopus and squid have eyes that evolved separately from us and they don’t have those annoying features. The wonderful biologist, Massimo Pigliucci, wrote, “that the only possible conclusions to this evidence are that God didn’t design the eye, or he’s pretty sloppy and not worthy of our unconditional admiration, or God likes squids a lot better than humans.”“
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