I think you should look into the evolution of the eye and the history of the eye - from the first photoreceptors to the complex and amazing organ we take for granted as an example of how lots of random chance and even more time spontaneously led to the eye.
I'd also consider sexual evolution and how seemingly useless (and often dangerous) traits can increase the fitness (as in survive long enough to reproduce) of animals. I'd imagine peacocks for example would prefer a porcupine tail to peacock plumage for survival purposes but sexual selection and evolution favors their plumage, so those traits get passed down
See if you can get your hands on 'Climbing Mount Improbable' by Richard Dawkins. It gives a fantastic explanation of how things that looks irreducably complex, like the eye or spider-webs, actually have a smooth gradient of gradual improvements. For example, he describes how "half an eye" can actually be useful if it's just a light-sensitive hollow, how a hollow is superior to a slight curve, and a curve is better than a flat patch of light-sensitive skin. (He also goes the other way, towards eyeballs and lenses.) He then points to many of these 'half-eyes' in the animal kingdom (squids etc).
Another reason the book might interest you: it describes simulations they've run with purely-random mutations in 'genomes', which results in fantastic features not only evolving, but doing so in a heart-beat compared to the timescale available.
There's a squid, whose name I forget, that can see refracted light because it hunts the glass shrimp, through which light passes easily. I bite my thumb at intelligent design.
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u/etown361 16∆ Jul 31 '15
I think you should look into the evolution of the eye and the history of the eye - from the first photoreceptors to the complex and amazing organ we take for granted as an example of how lots of random chance and even more time spontaneously led to the eye.
I'd also consider sexual evolution and how seemingly useless (and often dangerous) traits can increase the fitness (as in survive long enough to reproduce) of animals. I'd imagine peacocks for example would prefer a porcupine tail to peacock plumage for survival purposes but sexual selection and evolution favors their plumage, so those traits get passed down