But with the 1986 publication of The Blind Watchmaker by the zoologist and outspoken defender of Darwinism Richard Dawkins, the argument has been touted as a knock-down rejoinder to critics of Darwinism, and it has been extended to cover the evolution of any organ or biological feature. Darwin originated the argument, and Richard Dawkins is its most enthusiastic contemporary proponent. Unfortunately, the argument is weak, if not logically fallacious, for several reasons. Professor Pictet, in his excellent review of this work, in commenting on early transitional forms, and taking birds as an illustration, cannot see how the successive modifications of the anterior limbs of a supposed prototype could possibly have been of any advantage. The difficulty Pictet has with the evolution of the wing is answered by the assertion that the wing somehow did evolve.
Some complex animals have simple eyes, whereas some simple animals have complex eyes.
He speculates that perhaps Nautilus embryology precludes the necessary mutation, but he's not entirely satisfied with this explanation. In short, the Continuum Argument relies on analogy to make its point, but convergence is not an illustration of Darwinian evolution for any given feature. To use an analogy, suppose a computer has 16 megabytes of memory but 8 megabytes go bad. But if the computer itself is sliced in half, it will not work any more. Of course it is better to have an eye without a lens than to have no eye at all, but as the Nautilus' lensless tenure on earth demonstrates, this does not make the eye's evolutionary pathway any more apparent.