Page 64 - Miracle in the Eye

M MIRACLE IN THE EYE

This surprising tendency for attributes such as form, color, and move-
ment to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately
raises the question of how all the information is finally assembled, say
for perceiving a bouncing red ball. It obviously must be assembled
somewhere, if only at the motor nerves that subserve the action of
catching. Where it's assembled, and how, we have no idea. 17
Put another way, mankind has been exploring the brain for centuries.
Yet what we know still continues to be limited.
Man's present knowledge and technology has not allowed us to fully
understand the structure of the brain. So how did such a complicated organ
ever develop? Can billions of cells and trillions of proteins have come to-
gether over time to develop trillions of connections, each of which have par-
ticular significance, to eventually create the brain we know today?
The dilemma that evolution is still unable to escape is that not even one
of the billions of cells making up the brain or even one of the billions of pro-
teins making up the cells can possibly have formed by chance.

A Life in a Few Cubic Centimeters
From birth, everything a human sees is assembled in the dark, damp at-
mosphere of the brain known as the visual center, a few cubic centimeters in
size. To put this in perspective, everything we own, our childhood, the
schools we went to, our home, work, family, neighborhood, country, the
world, the universe, every single detail we have ever seen—briefly our en-
tire life—all came to be in a small piece of flesh.
If it did not exist, we wouldn't be able to see anything. None of the eye's
other miraculous features would be enough to allow us to see and retain
memories. The eye would be nothing more than a useless round mass filled
with fluid. Clearly, the eye alone could not function without the brain and
the visual center, both of which play an indispensable role in seeing.

The Role of the Brain in Seeing
By looking at the brain's visual functions, we can understand how
closely it works in synchronization with the eye. For instance, the brain

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