Al Islam

Organic Systems and Evolution

N ORGAN, in medical terms, is defined as any differentiated part devoted to a specific function. There are many organs in the human body which need to be studied in-depth to determine whether they evolved gradually over a very long period of time, or were created spontaneously in their finished form as some of the clergy believe. They defy the evolutionary theory of Darwin in its specifics, yet, we insist here that they do not defy evolution itself.

It is a complete misunderstanding on the part of the naturalists that the divide between them and the creationists is the real contention. The religious clergy they often allude to is the extremist faction among the Christian scholars who deny evolution at all levels and believe in spontaneity instead. Spontaneity means that each animal was created separately in its finished form with all the organs it contains. This is certainly not the Quranic concept of creation which we have been explaining throughout the book. It is completely different from the creationist's view found among the Christians. As such we should not be misunderstood and confused with the creationist when we discuss the creation and development of organs. One thing, however, is certain about the organic systems that even at their most rudimentary stage, they displayed four things simultaneously:

1. The creation of an outer component which in itself is entitled to be called an organ.
2. The creation of a transmission system like nerve cords which carry the information gathered by the outer organ.
3. The creation of an internal highly complicated recognition system which we refer to as a specific part of the brain. It is designed to receive the information and break it into components and to visualize the central message correctly.
4. Having done that, the brain centre has to transmit all the gathered information to a great number of other centres in the brain which take care of recording and re-distributing them to similar nerve centres in other parts of the body.

The purposefulness and design in the making of every organ which makes a component of this extremely complex organic system are but evident.

UR CONTENTION IS that eyes and ears etc. are erroneously described as single organs which can perform a meaningful function by themselves. As single organs they do not mean anything. They only begin to mean something when they are viewed as integral parts of the whole system to which they belong. Again, when minutely examined within their own confines, they reveal that they themselves are sub-systems comprising many smaller organs within them. Thus in their totality they acquire a relative role of sub-systems. Even at the rudimentary stages such organs are split into components which perfectly accord with the above description. The mechanism of sight, for instance, found among animals which existed hundreds of millions of years before humans were born, show the same complexity of well-organized systems. Their visual system also is composed of many organs. By what logic can this be attributed to natural selection or any other Darwinian principle is completely beyond human understanding.

We also intend to present to the reader the example of not just one sort of eye that we are familiar with, but some differently constructed eyes which serve the same purpose of connecting the outer world with the inner universe of the living. There is no exception to this universal rule. Again, it is our purpose to demonstrate to every sensible reader that in all these cases the structural details could not have been possible without pre-design and without the complete scientific know-how of a designer who conceived them. It should be remembered that each component comprises sub-components which themselves are highly complex and need a lot of explanation with regard to their internal composition and the nature of the material they are made of.

HE TWO MOST VITAL ORGANS which separate the living from the dead are the ears along with the auditory system they belong to, and the eyes as part of the optic system. We begin with the faculty of hearing in sequence as in the following verse of the Holy Quran:

And Allah brought you forth from the wombs of your mothers while you knew nothing, and gave you ears and eyes and hearts, that you might be grateful. 1

The reader should be reminded that the Arabic word () (al-Fuad) which is translated here as heart in fact always refers to the final seat of human understanding and not the physical heart. Many verses of the Quran strongly support this contention. For instance,

The heart of the Prophet was not untrue to that which he saw. 2

This verse refers to the vision of God's attributes by Prophet Muhammadsa. Evidently the translation 'heart' is a figure of speech which customarily refers to mind because it is not the physical heart which envisions the attributes of God, it is the human mind which does so. With this brief essential remark we return to the preceding discussion and demonstrate the anatomy of the human ear.

HE visible external part of the ear is called the auricle (pinna), slightly differently shaped in different individuals, some having big pinnas and some tiny ones. The purpose remains the same—to enlarge the catchment area of sound waves which are directed towards the outer opening. This makes the beginning of the external auditory canal. It extends into a tube about one inch long lined with skin which secretes some soft wax and is connected with the tympanic membrane (tympanum or the eardrum). Here ends the external ear. The tympanic membrane marks the boundary between the external and the middle ear. The air pressure on both sides is kept equal by means of a special tube, called the eustachian tube, which connects the middle ear cavity and the throat (pharynx). This mechanism is highly essential because it permits the eardrum to vibrate freely in both directions.

The middle ear is a slit-like cavity located between the external auditory canal and the internal ear. It contains air and three ossicles, or small bones, which are connected so that they amplify and transmit sound waves from the tympanic membrane to the inner ear. The three bones in the chain are called the malleus, the incus and the stapes. The American counterpart of this terminology is the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup. The first of these connects with the tympanic membrane and the second is joined to the first and the third ossicle. The third (stapes or stirrup) connects with the membrane of the oval window which in turn vibrates and transmits the vibration to the fluid in the internal ear.

The internal ear is a series of sacs and ducts which together perform the function of hearing and balance. This is the most complicated part of the whole ear comprising three separate spaces hollowed out inside the temporal bone. These spaces make up the bony labyrinth, comprising the vestibule, the cochlea and the semicircular canals, all filled with a fluid called perilymph. The membranes are lined with nerve endings extremely sensitive to the movement of fluid. In the fluid of the bony semicircular canals are the membranous canals which contain another fluid called endolymph. In a similar fashion, a membranous cochlea is situated in the perilymph of the bony cochlea and it is also filled with endolymph. The sound waves cause the tympanic membrane to vibrate as they strike it. These vibrations are enormously amplified by the ossicles and transmitted by them to the perilymph. The perilymph conducts them through the membrane to the endolymph. The waves of the endolymph are transmitted to tiny hair-like receptors which are stimulated and conduct nerve impulses through the nerve fibres to the brain centre (cerebrum).

Plate 7: The Human Ear (click to enlarge)

The function of balance is performed by the three loop shaped tubes of the semicircular canals which lie at right angles to one another in three different planes. The fluid within them rocks when the head is turned, even slightly, in any of the three planes. The signals are constantly transmitted to the cerebrum through nerves and are interpreted there. By this interpretation we learn which way we are positioned and in which direction our position is changing. Right, left, front, back, above and below are all precisely covered. The slightest change in one direction to another is recorded and a corresponding awareness is created in the brain.3 A sketch of the ear is presented in plate 7 to help the reader to visualize what has been described above.

We have briefly outlined the shape and the functions of parts of the ear. This description could be further elaborated with reference to the cells and tissues which constitute the parts and their internal complexities. Whatever we have described is quite sufficient to prove the point that the outer ear is an organ which defies all evolutionary theory for its gradual sequenced construction, slowly and bit by bit. Each part of this organ is essential for hearing, which if diseased, can either damage or render it completely out of order. We invite the attention of all who depend entirely on Darwinian principles as causative and commanding factors of evolution and request them to explain how such a perfect artifact of science and technology could have been created step by step in a billion or even a trillion years under the influence of the said principles. Can scientists, with all their advanced knowledge of the mechanisms of life, physics or advanced chemistry, design even the structure of this organ to make hearing possible? Now that they know the complexities of the hollowed temporal bone through which this labyrinth passes, can they copy and reconstruct it with a suitable material which they have synthesized themselves? Could they honestly believe that such a wonder could have ever been created without a purpose and without a functional design, precise to its minutest detail, merely under the mindless influence of natural selection? The greater the time span taken by the blind forces of nature to create such a wonder as the human ear, the more impossible it becomes to organize, bit by bit, its constituent parts into a meaningful sequence. There has to be a conscious operator with perfect knowledge of natural laws which could be pressed into service to create a human ear.

UT the outer organ we have discussed is not the only problem blind evolutionists will have to face and resolve. Now let us return to the nerve cords which transmit the pulses received by the ear. The making of these nerves in itself is an impossible task without there consciously being a design. Suitable material for their making has also to be synthesized and the electrical currents have to be provided to them in a precisely controlled manner. The nerve coatings have to be prepared from a special material which should insulate each nerve from its outer surroundings and protect it from the danger of short circuiting. This nerve must be attached in the right place to the inner ear while the other end needs to be connected to the precise spot in the cerebrum for it to deliver even the minutest vibrations, which when read together by the cerebrum make a complete message. We do not intend to explain the cerebrum itself, a task which lies beyond the scope of even the most knowledgeable scientists. The complexities of how it is made, how it performs all its functions and how it precisely transmits a meaningful message, which it has itself deciphered in the language of pulses, transmitted to the whole of the brain and further to the entire living body is impossible to have happened by itself. How the memory of that message is separately stored and preserved in the relevant receptacles, which may run into billions, and how the instant a particular message is required to be brought to the surface of our awareness, it is suddenly done without any apparent delay is yet another impossibility to have happened without having been specifically designed. For each such message to be brought back to the awareness requires an efficient computer far greater and more complex than any computer so far built by humans.

Let us visualize some moment of our childhood when we laughed at a sound created by an animal or a human around us. It is quite possible that even seventy years later we hear a similar sound and it tickles the stored up sounds of seventy years ago instantaneously and makes us smile again. This system of similar sounds is so minutely and precisely designed that it baffles the most advanced experts who excel in the science of acoustics. Can any devotee of Darwin ever believe that all these complexities of the hearing system could have been created by the blind hand of natural selection? But we are not talking simply of their separate individual creation. The most exasperating part of this exercise relates to their simultaneous coordinated development, completely independent, yet most perfectly corresponding with each other. As the outer ear began to grow, at that very moment, by chance, a nerve must have started to grow by itself and by the same forces their counterpart in the plane must also have begun to be shaped. Each totally unaware of each other, each totally incapable of designing itself, each having no purpose or design, yet each serving a grand scheme and collective purpose. This is the multiple dilemma we face, which relates only to a single organ or a combination of organs, each of which is essential for the sense of hearing.

What we promised, however, was not only to discuss the human ear and its complex organic system but also to discuss some other ears in the animal kingdom whose complexities are fathomless. Some of these still pose a challenge to the specialists to design on their drawing boards such animal ears with the same singular faculties.

ET US BEGIN WITH THE OWL, the symbol of wisdom in the West and that of utter stupidity in the East. Wise he may be but even the wisest among them could not have designed any auditory system let alone his own, and the most exquisite functional mechanism of his ears. To highlight its unique features we advise the reader to compare it with the human auditory system. The human ear, as in most animals, is divided into two receptacles. In most animals of advanced species they are similar and serve the same purpose. The information collected by both ears is harmonized by the brain as single sound yet it informs us with regard to the direction and location of the sound. Those who are hard of hearing in one ear always find it difficult to locate a sound. The separate placing of the two ears in itself pays great homage to their designer. But the naturalists refuse the existence of any design pertaining to this most masterly product of acoustic engineering. Yet if one suggests that this was neither wilfully designed nor created but must have happened under the influence of a non-creative mindless principle, how happily they would break into a smile and say yes, now you have got the point! Could a wise owl's smile be essentially different from theirs at such moments? But here we do not intend to elaborate this point further.

The ears of the owl are not only in line with an overall complicated design but they also stand out among all animal ears. The right and left outer ears in an owl are directed slightly differently in bearing to each other.This difference in their orientation is so well-measured and precisely designed as to serve a specific purpose. The slightest random variation in this intricate design could have rendered them useless. The sounds they emit to the internal ear are transmitted to the brain which deciphers them perfectly despite their complexity. The whole system is so unique and precise in its intricacies as enables the owl to hunt for its prey in absolute darkness without ever making a mistake.

Intrigued by this uncanny ability of the owl, the scientific community of the world has performed the fantastic task of exactly defining the owl's hearing system with the most sophisticated electronic devices. To our knowledge the greatest work on this was carried out by Masakazu Konishi, Bing Professor of Behavioural Biology at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues. Their work was published in Scientific American, April 1993. 4 Although we bank largely on this article for the following information our brief description does not do justice to the great intricate work. Anyone interested in more scientific and mathematical data would be amply rewarded by reading that great scholarly thesis.

An Owl Hunting Prey (click to enlarge)

The unique auditory mechanism enables the owl to detect the feeblest sound emitted by the flutter of a mouse beneath fallen leaves in the dead of night. He knows exactly how far, in which direction, and at what spot the mouse is hiding. He correctly reads the distance down to the scale of millimetres. In total darkness, with soundless fluttering of his wings, he swoops down upon the mouse and scoops him up in his claws with such precision as not even the soil under the mouse is disturbed. Who shaped these ears and how? Can even the most talented plastic surgeon alter the position and shape of any human ear of a blind person, ever so slightly, so that he can be compensated for his loss of sight and negotiate as freely as an owl does in total darkness?

Blind evolution, they tell us however, chanced upon such a masterpiece of craftsmanship and natural selection, playing no creative role, just selected it for survival. How naturalists can keep calm over their exasperating beliefs and contradictory realities of creative processes is beyond human comprehension.

HE ANATOMY OF THE EAR OF THE BAT is also a complex subject difficult to compress in a short description. The constructional detail of their middle ear and their internal ear, though generally in line with that of humans, has some specific additional features which are unique to them and perfectly harmonized with their requirements.

A Bat Capturing a Moth (click to enlarge)

Of special note are the ears of insect eating bats. Their sonar system is so intricate that it can put to shame even the most advanced sonar system designed by highly competent scientists. These bats can fly at amazingly high speeds in pitch darkness and their vocal cords and ear receptors are perfectly harmonized to the environment. An insect eating bat can chuckle at staggeringly fast speeds at such high pitch that if a perfect protective system had not been devised, the sounds it emits could damage its own ears. This problem is resolved by the creation of the stapedius muscle in the middle ear attached to three tiny bones, the malleus, the incus and the stapes, which are responsible for transmitting the sound waves to the internal ear. At each click the bat emits, this muscle pulls aside the stapes which touches the eardrum; hence, no sound of the click is directly transmitted to the internal ear. The frequency of clicks and such momentary breaks of contact is a make and break system which never fails despite its high frequency. Such bats are known to emit these sounds more than 200 times per second and this muscle can keep pace with these rapid variations. Yet when the sound strikes against a solid object and returns to the ear, the contact of the bone with the drum is immediately renewed so that no echo is ever missed by the bat during the innumerable intervals of disconnection.5 How it can perform this magic beats comprehension. Imagine, 200 sounds per second with not a ripple transmitted to the internal ear and yet it connects 200 times again in order not to miss a single echo of the returning sound signals. The bat's ear does it in an amazingly complex world of sound and echoes which are delivered in different pitches with different frequencies. Thousands of bats flying in a small chamber in total darkness continue to click at different pitches. The bats do not interfere with each others' signals as if each sound is tagged with a different frequency that is recognized by every bat.

The conscious command of frequency is the most amazing part of the system. The faster the clicks are emitted, the faster information is updated in fractions of seconds, so that bats can negotiate with perfect ease every interfering object, be it another bat or a physical obstruction. They can safely negotiate through innumerable branches in the lush growth of dark forests without striking against any of them. In the bat caves they can manoeuvre their flight in accordance with the contours, or rocks and their undulating surfaces. They never strike their heads against other bats or protrusions, barring some very rare accidents. They can perceive a thread thinner than a hair and avoid collision. All this is done with signals, their frequencies and pitches, entirely at the command of acoustic bats.

The Bat's Sonar Abilities (click to enlarge)

When necessary, some bats can emit 200 clicks per second, each lasting only one thousandth of a second but kept apart sufficiently from other similar signals so that the internal make and break system constantly keeps pace with it. Within one thousandth of a second the contact of the bone, the counterpart of ossicles in humans, is broken from the eardrum and before the signal arrives back as echo it is made again, never failing within this extremely short space of time.5 All this is intentional. The bat knows how to raise the frequency of signals, fully commanding their pitches and changing them exactly, as needed. It can choose the frequency which does not interfere with other hundreds of thousands of bat signals. One really wonders how the hand of natural selection could have shaped the ears, the throats and the brains of the bats with such profound precision and such complete harmony. If a man happens to be there, the clicks may not be heard by him at all. Most of them are at a pitch which cannot be heard by human ears. All this profusion of sound signals if audible to man would explode his eardrums, yet luckily, all that he perceives is perfect silence in a jungle full of bats.

The Internal Auditory System of the Bat's Ear (click to enlarge)

The disuse of eyes over a very long period of time has a shrivelling effect, like a human limb when it is not used for years is rendered useless. Prolonged effect of disuse will always continue to shrivel an organ until it becomes smaller and smaller, and may finally become obliterated. This phenomenon is common to life and spares nothing. Thus the eyes of the insect eating bats are also reduced to such a miniature size as to appear like mere holes to an observer. The fruit eating bats however have large beautiful eyes which can see, discern and locate. Returning to the construction of the bat's ear, over and above what we have said about the complexity of the human ear, the extra muscle which works as a most precise make and break machine offers an unanswerable challenge to the evolutionists. Remove the specific function of the tiny muscle, which it performs only in the case of bats, and the whole hearing system of the insect eating bats would become totally ineffective. How could natural selection have played any role in the creation and selection of that muscle? Its precise construction and location can certainly not be attributed to it. The only part natural selection could have played was to wait until random and mutational changes had created so many possible variations of this muscle from which it could finally choose. But it is impossible to visualize that this specific muscle with its specific functions could have been created by the random creative forces of life at work, without design, perfect know-how and precise technology. Made-to-measure precise instruments such as these are created to perform specific tasks in specific contexts and cannot be dismissed as random.

NCIDENTALLY, there is another similar example from among the birds which is also singular and precisely tailor-made. It saves the animal from the ill effects of its own functional ability—an ability unique in the entire animal kingdom.

The Woodpecker (click to enlarge)

The beak of the woodpecker rapidly strikes at such points upon the trunks of trees where it locates the presence of worms by acutely listening to their crawling movements. It begins to strike so rapidly that hundreds of strikes are powerfully made in a second which scare the worms out of their hideout for the woodpecker to scoop them up with its long elastic tongue. It is so fast that humans cannot distinguish between different strikes which appear to them as a single blur. That functional availability is exceptional among birds. More exceptional and unique is the system which protects the brain of the woodpecker from being damaged by the impact of extremely powerful shock waves produced by the striking beak.

Between the beak and the brain there is a separating impact absorbing tissue which prevents the shock waves reaching the brain directly. No other bird can strike at such a rate and no other bird is provided with such a protective device. This is another example of how animals are protected against the possible harm of their own specialized functional abilities. We wonder if any naturalist could suggest any random methodology to explain how natural selection could have chanced upon this.

Let us now return to the main topic of discussion on the ear, sound waves and sonar devices. From the birds of darkness in the air let us delve deep to the bottom of the muddy seas and rivers such as the Indus, the Ganges and the Amazon and see how animals confronting such murky habitats can shift and negotiate.

OLPHINS are provided with a fantastic sonar device which they employ to their advantage both in the open seas and thick muddy bottoms of oceans and rivers. The thick stagnant mud would not permit them to see what lies even a few inches in front of them. What they need is not merely their eyes but a complete sonar system with which all dolphins are equipped. This system is so complex and interdependent as requires a special study. Special passages and sinuses are created in its head through which it most powerfully compresses a current of air which strikes against the top. There happens to be on the forehead of these dolphins a large fat-packed, oval shaped organ called a melon. The compressed air, when it strikes against the melon, activates it to initiate a strange incomprehensible phenomenon. That lump of fat immediately turns into a fantastic sonar station. It works like a sound lens that emits a sonic searchlight which can move ahead uninterrupted by the turbid waters or mud.

The Dolphin (click to enlarge)

The dolphin can emit 700 such sonar signals per second which are echoed back when they strike against any solid object. The echoes are perfectly calculated by the dolphin's brain to indicate to it the exact distance between the dolphin and the object, and also the precise nature of that obstruction. It can perceive a small metallic object at some distance and know exactly whether it is filled or empty. It can distinguish between living and non-living objects. The dolphin employs the same device in the open seas to detect fish even miles ahead. Aided by the same sonar device, it rapidly homes in on them constantly calculating how close it has reached the shoal before it begins to rapidly swallow them up, one after the other.6 Could natural selection create this complex sonar system with an exactly corresponding receptive apparatus in the brain which could precisely decipher the echoes? Can any naturalist create a similar bulk of fat to produce a well-directed sonar beam? Whatever modern technology he may employ, let him try his hand at producing even a single sonar wave from such a fatty bulk. Yet a dolphin's melon can somehow produce 700 such waves per second.

The great brainwave of Darwin, which the naturalists believed solved the riddle of life, could only produce three dead principles: struggle for existence, survival of the fittest and natural selection to carve and modulate life. The naturalists prefer to forget that all these three principles are dead, deaf, dumb and sightless. They are not creative principles. They only operate when some creator has already produced something for them to work upon. The naturalist has to demonstrate first the creative processes of the dolphin's hearing system, only then can they talk of what natural selection might have done to them. We only demand from them not to confuse the two issues of natural selection and creative factors. How and which creative processes were at work in the case of the dolphin, or the bat for that matter, and how did they gradually begin to develop these systems to perfection? How did Darwinian principles aid the anonymous creator at each creative step before they were finally consummated into their present form?

Now, we shall move on to discuss the faculty of sight and commence with a brief overview of the human eye.

HE EYE, as we shall demonstrate, is a very delicate and intricate organ. As such it is carefully and naturally protected. The dorsal part, or the back half of the eyeball, is protected by the skull bones while the eyelids and eyelashes aid in protecting the anterior part, or the front half of the eye.

A sac separates the anterior part of the eye from the eyeball itself and is lined with an epithelial membrane which aids in the destruction of some pathogenic bacteria that may enter from the outside.

Should any small foreign object enter the lid area the natural defence system is immediately activated. Swift eyelid movement and tears released by the tear glands, containing an antibacterial enzyme, try to wash it away. These tears then drain away into tear ducts located in the lower corners of the sockets and leading to the nasal cavity. The eyeball itself rests against protective cushions of fat within its socket, and is attached by pairs of muscles extending from the inside of the socket to the eyeball. These are the muscles which move the eye.

Plate 8: The Human Eye (click to enlarge)

The eye (see plate 8) has an almost spherical shape. The wall of the eyeball consists of three layers:

1. The sclera: the outermost layer made of tough white connective tissue, commonly known as the white of the eye. It bulges and is transparent at its front, forming the cornea.
2. The choroid layer: the middle layer made of a delicate network of connective tissue and richly supplied with blood vessels. This layer completely surrounds the eye except for the pupil which is a small opening at the front of the eye, directly behind the cornea. Around the pupil the choroid layer is pigmented, known as the iris, giving eyes their different colours, either brown, blue, green, hazel or a combination of these. It is the pupil which controls the amount of light entering the eye onto the convex crystalline lens attached to the choroid layer by ciliary muscles. These muscles, when they contract, allow the eye to focus on objects whether they are near or far. The aqueous humor is a watery fluid filling the area between the cornea and the lens and helps to maintain the forward curve of the cornea. Behind the lens, the entire space is filled with a thicker transparent substance, the vitreous humor, which is necessary to keep the eyeball firm and in its spherical shape.7
3. The retina: the innermost and perceptive layer less than a millimetre thick. It includes some 10 different layers of cells known as the receptors, ganglia and nerve fibres.8 The receptors, better referred to as photoreceptors, are of two types: cones and rods. There are about 130 million rod cells for black and white vision and only 7 million cone cells for colour vision in the human eye.9 Cones are conical in shape. The light which is focused on the retina stimulates the cones and rods. The cones perform the major function of splitting the light into various colours. If defective, the person would become colour-blind. During the full light of day the cones are sufficient to perform all the functions of sight. Rods are rendered useless yet they have their own importance in dim or night vision. In dim light, or total darkness, it is the rods which perform the function of vision but they can only differentiate between black and white. Cones cannot work at all under such conditions. During very dim light, colours become faded or totally disappear. When a person moves from a brightly lit place to a dark room the time he takes to begin to see things again is the time taken by the rods to become fully reactivated. The cones and rods transfer their stimulation to the ganglia which are situated near the front of the retina. When stimulated, they start impulses which stimulate the ganglia in front. From the ganglia more than half a million nerve fibres carry the impulses to a large cranial nerve called the optic nerve. The spot where the optic nerve joins the retina is called the blind spot because there are no cones and rods there.

ROM THE BACK of each eyeball, separate optic nerves take up the function of transmission of sight to the occipital lobe of the cerebrum which make the centre of vision. This centre is divided into two lobes, one for each eye. Some of the optic fibres cross from the right eyeball to the left, and from the left to the right. Thus what one sees with each eye is interpreted in both lobes.10 The image formed by the retina is inverted but the centre of vision re-erects it. The centre of vision performs other fantastic things as well. The image is in fact very tiny but is enlarged to life-size and what we see enlarged is sometimes a hundred thousand times or billions of times greater than the original image. Cast a glance towards the stars. The vision of vast space which fills the tiny spot in the brain is many trillions of times greater than the original image cast on the retina. This act of wonder is performed not by the organ, the eyeball alone, but by the entire visual system of the three major organs involved. However, the grandest display of resultant imagery is performed by the centre of vision in the brain.

The retina also does some other wondrous things. It works as a film that captures visions, washes them instantly and new visions replace the previous ones; a task which is impossible to be performed by man-made films and videotapes. Far more amazing things are done by the centre of vision. It immediately preserves the image in life-size somewhere in the intricate filing system of the brain. Billions of such images can be recorded and preserved during the lifetime of a person. A man with a healthy mind can, in an instant, invoke an image cast during his early childhood with the same colour, environment and lifelike size. Again, the stimuli which are related to a particular image, however remote they may have been in time, are also invoked with the resurrection of the image. Thus, the brain makes the third organ of the organic system of sight.

ROFOUND scientific research has been made on the fear stimuli in various animals and their effect on the receptive organ of sound and vision referred to as the brain. They have discovered that the imprint of fear on the relevant brain tissue, whether caused by sound or sight, is permanent. Its response can be subdued or erased by psychiatric or medical treatment but the image itself remains permanent. The whole optic system frustrates all attempts by the modern scientists to fully understand it. No man-made optic or auditory system comprising the three organs we have discussed can ever match the intricacies of these amazing coordinating machines. This should have been the area of the naturalists research to discover which forces play a creative harmonious role. That is what they do not attempt, perhaps because evidently the fingers of these composite systems would be raised in the direction of God and not in the direction of Darwin. We are talking here of internal biology and mechanisms of life, not of the external forces which blindly operate and have nothing to do with the mechanisms just described.

As we have suggested in this book before, the beginning of vision does not begin with the creation of eyes. It is a composite sense of awareness which grows in an animal resulting in organic development. Recent, intense scientifically controlled tests have been carried out in the dark underwater world, hundreds of metres below the sea surface and the research is being extended beyond to the sea bed several kilometres below. At around 200 metres, light practically disappears. During this probe, it was discovered that the dark underworld of oceans presents some completely eyeless animals who show reaction to the weak glimmer of light emitted by phosphorescent animals. This discovery was made with the help of a highly advanced electronic machine called the Ventana. It carries no pilot and is remotely controlled via cables which also guarantees a constant supply of electricity to the Ventana. The same cables carry the information back to the scientists sitting in the ships above, closely watching the experiment day and night. A fascinating report of this experiment was published in Scientific American, July 1995.11 Among so many other amazing things it shows that Medusa, a jellyfish, possesses no eyes whatsoever yet showed a reaction to the robots' light by sinking deeper. This is exactly what we claimed earlier, that it is the diffused awareness of the living at the lowest level of their existence which is employed by the Creator to give birth to the sensory organs. Every beginning is often a tiny beginning yet it is likely to grow to higher stages of fascinating developments. The next step to this general awareness, as explicitly displayed by Medusae, has to be an eye like a pinhole camera without lenses and this is exactly what we find in nature. But even this pinhole eye cannot be modelled by any Darwinian principle because even at this rudimentary stage it presents a full optic system and not a casual hole. These animals have two pinholes instead of one, converging a mutually coordinated information to a receptacle behind, which in turn passes it on to an inner sense of awareness that can be referred to as a sort of elementary brain. Moreover, the system we observe in humans is also found as fully developed in the optic organs of ancient animals which lived many hundreds of millions of years before. It remarkably reduces the time left at the disposal of blind evolution from the beginning to the creation of such animals. Most insects are found with complete optic systems and some fish fossils in Australia have been dated as five hundred million years old, with holes indicating large eyes.12 This further reduces the time for bit by bit development of animals' eyes to a mere five hundred million years which is incredibly small for their evolution to take place. Take note that this expanse of five hundred million years has to be divided further into subsections, a portion of which has to be employed for the creation of the bricks of life. However, the entire time available from the beginning to the end of the ultimate consummation of life is in itself far too short—as though it were a mere tiny speck compared to what was needed. The building of the bricks of life alone requires a time unimaginably greater than the entire time spent on evolution, yet that too has to be accommodated within this short period. This is the magnitude of the dilemma the scientists face. Whether to weep at them or to laugh is the dilemma for the rest of the world to resolve.

All eyes, wherever they are found in the animal kingdom, perform a scientific function for which they are perfectly designed. They are completely harmonious with their surroundings. Purposelessness negates the existence of an instrument which performs any function. If even a rudimentary instrument is created before it is put to some function, that function has to be presupposed. This is the simple logic of the realities of life.

Man began to work with stones. These stones were apparently without a purpose but the moment we see them shaped into axes with a handle attached, no sane man can declare that even this rudimentary machine was created by chance without purpose. What life offers is billions of times more complex. Each creation of life serves a purpose and is exactly designed to serve it. To call it a purposeless creative journey is blindness supreme.

(click to enlarge)

REFERENCES

1. Translation of 16:79 by Maulawi Sher Ali.
2. Translation of 53:12 by Maulawi Sher Ali.
3. Anatomy Notes (details not listed).
4. KONISHI, M. (April, 1993) Listening with Two Ears. Scientific American, pp.34–41
5. DAWKINS, R. (1996) The Blind Watchmaker. Penguin Books Ltd, England, pp.27–29
6. DAWKINS, R. (1996) The Blind Watchmaker. Penguin Books Ltd, England, pp.96–97
7. Anatomy Notes (details not listed).
8. OTTO, J.H., TOWLE, A. (1977) Modern Biology. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers. USA, p.592
9. The Hutchinson Dictionary of Science (1993) Helicon Publishing Ltd. London, p.224
10. OTTO, J.H., TOWLE, A. (1977) Modern Biology. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers. USA, pp.593–595
11. ROBISON, B.H. (July, 1995) Light In The Ocean's Midwaters. Scientific American, pp.51–56
12. LONG, JOHN A. (1995) The Rise of Fishes 500 million years of Evolution. University of New South Wales Press, Australia. (Also worthy of study are his other works on fishes like The Rise of Fishes (1957)).