An eye for detail
Why your eyes ‘jitter’
by David Catchpoole
Photo stock.xchng
The human eye—just look at what it can do! For example, the eye’s dynamic
range exceeds that of the best man-made photodetectors, and is now known to have
intricate microscopic machinery behind it—a motor, glue, ‘calmer’
and internal ‘train tracks’; all beautifully coordinated. (See
Excellent Eye.) All evidence of design, and therefore a Designer.
Note: Some creationists, in their witnessing or when debating evolution, like to
use Darwin’s quote about the absurdity of eye evolution from Origin of Species.
However, citing his statement at face value is subtly out of context, which is why
we have included it in our list of the
Arguments we think creationists should NOT use. (DVD available here.) Darwin was talking about
its seeming absurdity but then said that after all it was quite easy to imagine
that the eye could be built step-by-step (in his opinion, with which we obviously
disagree—see also
Darwin v The Eye and
An eye for creation). But anyone claiming that step-by-step evolution
of the eye is ‘quite easy to imagine’ would do well to consider whether
such imaginings have any basis in fact. (They don’t.) See
Eye evolution, a case study; and
The good, the bad and the evolutionary.
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When you fix your gaze on something, your eyes ‘jitter’, i.e. they make
small, involuntary movements. These jitters wiggle the image on the retina. In the
1950s, researchers using cumbersome mirrors to negate the jitter when volunteers
looked at an object discovered that the volunteers began to lose sight of the object
(disappearing into a featureless grey), so the researchers concluded that jittering
kept the image from fading.
More recently, Boston University neuroscientist Michele Rucci and his colleagues, using
computer technology to track the eye’s movements, discovered that
the jitters are crucial to helping the brain discern the finer details of an image.1 Negating the jitters resulted
in a 16% reduction in volunteers’ ability to pick out the details in fine-lined
patterns—the same ability needed in locating a single tree in a forest, or
a berry on a bush.
‘Vision isn’t like a camera, where you take a picture and the brain
processes it,’ explains Rucci. ‘The actual process of looking …
affects what you see.’2
Who would have ever thought that the eye’s involuntary movements had such
a crucial function? Obviously the eye’s Creator knew what He was doing. He
had an eye for detail—that we might have the same.
Related articles
Recommended Resources
References
- Rucci, M., Iovin, R., Poletti, M. and Santini, F., Miniature
eye movements enhance fine spatial detail, Nature 447(7146):852–855,
14 June 2007. Return to Text.
- Telis, G., Shifty eyes see finer details, ScienceNOW Daily
News, <sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/613/2>, epub. 13 June
2007, acc. 21 June 2007. Return to Text.
Published: 12 September 2007(GMT+10)
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