More from my e-mail discussion of evolution. For those of you who aren't into science, if you can hang in there for a paragraph or two I think you'll understand the illustration. It's a tremendous example of pure common sense applied to the existing data:

There is a (I don't remember the exact numbers here, but I'm close) 27 molecule chain reaction that takes place in the human eye in the amount of time it takes light to travel the width of a human hair. This chain reaction produces an electrical impulse that travels down the optic nerve to the brain. The result is the illusion that we call "sight." My understanding is that if you take any one of the molecules out of the chain reaction, you end up with a blind human. And that doesn't begin to answer the question of how the eye got there, the presence of the optic nerve, or the ability of the brain to process the information.

To me, these kinds of questions should provide great support for evolutionary theory. If evolution happened, it happened on a molecular level. We can now see things at the level and examine them. This should take us well beyond comic book science. If evolution is the result of very tiny, random changes, they we ought to be able to trace the chains backwards at a molecular level.

Please take a human eye and simplify it, using only existing structures and parts already present, and do evolution in reverse. Take me back to a very simple, working organ that could, say, detect motion. And then move forward, molecule molecule, small random change by small random change, and show how every one of the small changes is a very small step that leaves the organism with some kind of adaptive advantage that would explain the spread of the minute change from the one individual in which the random change took place to the rest of the species.

Okay, maybe it's not fair to ask you to take us that far back. Can you go back 25 steps? If not, why not? How exactly did this marvel of complexity arise from random events? If you go back one step, removing one of the molecules from the chain reaction, you end up with a blind human. We have to conclude that the entire chain reaction was put in place all at once. There is no reason for "natural selection" to add piece by piece to a structure that isn't doing anything.

It's comic book science, and I'm not buying it.