Evolution: natural mechanism but guided somehow?

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Hi,

First, I'm not pushing towards the idea of god or any theology here. I strongly believe that everything is purely pushed by science and reason.
However, I sometimes stop at one point which might be a gap in my knowledge when I think about evolution.
I am convinced that evolution takes place, and has been taking place, through years and generations. I know that eye was so simple many generations ago.. Simply a light chamber that shows if there is light or not.. Then in later generations it developed to show the direction of light, then some basic shadows, etc... This all occurs naturally.. Natural selection and other mechanisms..

However, there is something strange here. For example, when first generations of animals developed protection for eyes, how did whatever causing evolution know that this protection should be a layer of transparent material so that light can still go through it?
Random natural selection? So, we expect some of those animals to have developed black protection then following generations figured out that this is not working and eventually chose to equip transparent protection layers?
I don't think this is the case..

There are hundreds of similar questions.. Mechanisms are natural, ok, but there seems to be kind of decision making here. A decision to protect eyes, in our example, and to make the protection transparent, and other good characteristics.. How did animal bodies know that transparent eye protection should be transparent if selection is really random here? If it's random, how is it being guided for suitable solutions?
Again, not suggesting god but this needs an explanation. Most evolution books explain natural selection on basis of "the strongest lives" without addressing this point.
Any ideas?

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@Alan MC,

Alan MC wrote:

how did whatever causing evolution know that this protection

There wasn't (isn't) anything "causing evolution".

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@Alan MC,

Alan MC wrote:

So, we expect some of those animals to have developed black protection then following generations figured out that this is not working and eventually chose to equip transparent protection layers?
I don't think this is the case..

Why do you not think that's the case?

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@Alan MC,

"...how did whatever causing evolution know that..."
This is an error that comes from perspective of the observer.

During the industrial revolution soot from smoke stacks became a common occurrence, and covered the local trees. That was a change in the environment; the soot-covered trees that used to be brown had become black.

And there were moths that lived on those trees. They were brown, and had bark-patterned wings to hide from the birds that ate them. But now that the trees were black instead of brown, those brown moths stood out against the background and the birds ate most of the brown moths.

Evolution doesn't propose a solution for the brown moths. What it does do (and had always done) is produce a sleight variety in brown moths. There were lighter brown moths and darker brown moths. The lightest stood out the most and so were eaten. They often didn't survive long enough to have baby light brown moths.

The darkest brown moths were hardest to spot and so more of those survived, and had baby dark brown moths. And there was also slight variety in the baby dark brown moths, so that some of them were just a little dark brown and some were very dark brown.

That process culled out the least fit to the environment so that the new normal for the moths became the color of soot-covered trees. The soot-colored moths continue to produce a small spread of color variance, and the most fit to the current environment will be the ones that have babies.

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You are begging your own question by assuming that any "thing" causes evolution. If a stone cracks because it froze in the night, and the morning sunlight warmed it rapidly, the sun did not cause that, it's just physics. If as a consequence, part of the stone falls off, knocking other stones over, and the consequence of that is an avalanche, the stone did not cause the avalanche, and the sun did not cause the avalanche, it's just physics. It's just how things work, and there is no purpose behind any of it.

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@Alan MC,

Evolution is usually "taking something youve already got and doing something new with it". The nictating membrane of most chordates is a layer that arose from the already exiting layers of the cornea that make up the sclera an conjunctiva. In primates , these nictating membranes are shrunken and serve as tear ducts .The question of course is "how did these originally arise"? Thats the question that says how did eyes ultimately originate?

So many tricks of evolution that correspond to adaptation are played by tissues and existing organs in an animals (or plants) structure that conducting the search for the irreducible complexity is the only argument that"Designed" evolution has left.
Truthfully, science really isnt much interested in these "IC's" unless they provide some new biochemistry to actually do something with or learn something from.

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I think people fail to understand how much variation is out there, both in expressed morphology and in unexpressed genes.

The reason it seems like functional organs appear to be planned for, is because the 99% of variations which didn't work out are invisible to us. What we are left with in biology is like a thin line of success wending its way through a cloud of other possibilities. The force which is guiding the outcome is Selection. No intelligent planning is required because the elements of the process itself are sufficient. Computer programs are already being created using nothing more than Reproduction, Variation and Selection.

The modeling environments which create these programs contain records of all the possible lines which evolve, and there are far more failures than successes. But in the end, unless we explicitly look for them, all we see is the end product which survives (or in the case of a program... "functions").

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@Alan MC,

Quote: “how did animal bodies know....”

Just as intelligent designers like mankind can create cars with sensors “to know” when to raise and lower a sun roof on a convertible car, it seems lifeforms can do the same thing because the ability to “know” has been built in.

Kinda like maple keys ‘know to use’ helicopter design, or burrbushes ‘know’ to use Velcro, or some spiders ‘know’ to build parachutes and utilize the wind for transportation.

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@Helloandgoodbye,

also for our Creation "science" believers...

"In order to deny the truth, you must first understand what it says"...

The above example of "Creationist thinking demonstrates the effects of that limitation

The guys that invented velcro gave all kinds of credit to nature, It allowed them to copy the tiny hook and fibre structure of burdock seed pods. "What ifn we copy this , except lets make the hooks real tiny "

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@Alan MC,

No natural mechanism could produce the miracle of flight.
Amazing!
https://answersingenesis.org/animal-behavior/miracle-flight/

‘Despite all our advances with human flight, we don’t come close to matching the wonder of birds and their feathered flight.’

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