Page 282 - Darwinism Refuted

DARWINISM REFUTED

types requiring a string of chance events just by natural selection? It is a
matter for debate whether Darwinists have been able to provide a
satisfactory answer to this question… 345
This problem is so great from the evolutionist point of view that the
closer we look at the details, the worse the quandary the theory finds
itself in. One important "detail" which needs to be looked at is the claim
about "the cell which came to be sensitive to light." Darwinists gloss this
over by saying, "Sight may have started by a single cell becoming
sensitive to light." But what kind of design is such a structure supposed
to have had?

The Chemistry of Sight
In his book Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe stresses that the
structure of the living cell and all other biochemical systems were
unknown "black boxes" for Darwin and his contemporaries. Darwin
assumed that these black boxes possessed very simple structures and
could have come about by chance. Now, however, modern biochemistry
has opened up these black boxes and revealed the irreducibly complex
structure of life. Behe states that Darwin's comments on the emergence of
the eye seemed convincing because of the primitive level of nineteenth-
century science:
Darwin persuaded much of the world that a modern eye evolved gradually
from a simpler structure, but he did not even try to explain where his
starting point—the relatively simple light-sensitive spot—came from. On the
contrary, Darwin dismissed the question of the eye's ultimate origin… He
had an excellent reason for declining the question: it was completely beyond
nineteenth-century science. How the eye works—that is, what happens
when a photon of light first hits the retina—simply could not be answered at
that time. 346
So, how does this system, which Darwin glossed over as a simple
structure, actually work? How do the cells in the eye's retinal layer
perceive the light rays that fall on them?
The answer to that question is rather complicated. When photons hit
the cells of the retina they activate a chain action, rather like a domino
effect. The first of these domino pieces is a molecule called "11-cis-retinal"

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