Here's Dawkins summing up of how the eye evolved-
"It is not difficult then for rudimentary lens-like objects to come into existence spontaneously. Any old lump of halfway transparent jelly need only assume a curved shape" (Richard Dawkins: 'Climbing Mount Improbable', page146)
So there you have it folks, according to him, a lump of jelly decided to spontaneously appear as if by magic out of nowhere, and then decided to magically shape itself into a lens.
He's left one thing out of the theory, namely who waved the magic wand?..
You really are a fan of the quote-mine. Let’s read it again, with some context, and it will become obvious that he’s not asserting at all that “a lump of jelly decided to spontaneously appear as if by magic out of nowhere.” It will also become apparent why quote mining is such a dishonest tactic. (The portion of the quote you provided can be found in bold font. The portions in italics indicate the point Dawkins was trying to make.):
“It is a fact of physics that light rays are bent when they pass from one transparent material into another transparent material. The angle of bending depends upon which two materials they happen to be, because some substances have a greater refractive index – a measure of the capacity to bend light – than others. If we are talking about glass and water, the angle of bending is slight because the refractive index of water is nearly the same as that of the glass. If the junction is between glass and water, the light is bent through a bigger angle because air has a relatively low refractive index. At the junction between water and air, the angle of bending is substantial enough to make an oar look bent. ….
…
A pebble is just one example of an accidental, undersigned object which can happen to work as a crude lens. There are others. A drop of water hanging from a leaf has curved edges. It can’t help it. [/i]Automatically, without further design from us, it will function as a rudimentary lens. [/i]Liquids and gels fall automatically into curved shapes unless there is some force, such as gravity, positively opposing this. This will often mean that they cannot help functioning as lenses. The same is often true of biological materials. A young jellyfish is both lens-shaped and beautifully transparent. It works as a tolerably good lens, even though its lens properties are never actually used in life and there is no suggestion that natural selection has favoured its lens-like properties. The transparency is probably an advantage because it makes it hard for enemies to see, and the curved shape is an advantage for some structural reason having nothing to do with lenses.
Here are some images I projected on to a screen using various crude and undersigned image-forming devices. Figure 5.12a shows a large letter A, as projected on a sheet of paper at the back of a pinhole camera (a closed cardboard box with a hole in one side). You probably could scarcely read it if you weren’t told what to expect, even though I used a very bright light to make the image. In order to get enough light to read it at all, I had to make the ‘pin’ hole quite large, about a centimetre across. I might have sharpened the image by narrowing the pinhole, but then the film would not have registered it – the familiar trade-off we have already discussed.
Now see what a difference a crude and undesigned ‘lens’ makes. For Figure 5.12b the same letter A was again projected through the same hole on to the back wall of the same cardboard box. But this time I hung a polythene bag filled with water in front of the hole. The bag was not designed to be particularly lens-shaped. It just naturally hangs in a curvaceous shape when you fill it with water. I suspect that a jellyfish, being smoothly curved instead of rucked up into creases, would have produced an even better image. Figure 5.12c (‘CAN YOU READ THIS’
was made with the same cardboard box and hole, but this time a round wine goblet filled with water was placed in front of the hole instead of a sagging bag. Admittedly the wine glass is a man-made object, but its designers never intended it to be a lens and they gave it its globular shape for other reasons.
Once again, an object that was not designed for the purpose turns out to be an adequate lens.
Of course, polythene bags and wineglasses were not available to ancestral animals. I am not suggesting that the evolution of the eye went through a polythene-bag stage, any more than it went through a cardboard-box stage.
The point about the polythene bag is that, like a raindrop or a jellyfish or a rounded quartz crystal, it was not designed as a lens. It takes on a lens-like shape for some other reason which happens to be influential in nature.
It is not difficult then, for rudimentary lens-like objects to come into existence spontaneously. Any old lump of halfway-transparent jelly needs only to assume a curved shape (there are all sorts of reasons why it might) and it will immediately confer at least a slight improvement over a simple cup or pinhole.
Slight improvement is all that is required to inch up the lower slopes of Mount Improbable.”
Climbing Mount Improbable - Richard Dawkins - Google Books
See how the point he was making was completely different from the one you thought he was making? Such is the result of quote mining and serves to demonstrate why it’s so dishonest.
