Link?

I cant's see the argument shredded by modeling....

Sure. It's pretty straightforward. Dawkins is making an argument against intelligent design. He does so by setting up an artificial argument: 1) The eye is "backwards"; light has to pass through the wiring 2) any engineer dislikes disarray; why would they design a photoreceptor where the light has to pass through the wiring 3) therefore, it's unlikely that eyes were "designed", for if they were, they would be much nicer and more tidy.

(see The Blind Watchmaker, "This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer)".

In short, Dawkins argument is weak- it appeals to design tidiness, not to any real facts or logic about how evolution works. But as this modelling (oh, and I see they did some experimental work as well) shows, it's just as likely that the mammalian eye configuration isn't as bad as he said.

The arguments against intelligent design should be based on reality. Dawkins is probably right about this sort of thing (that there is no ID), but he's typically right for the wrong reason (specious logic).

(Dawkins then further argues against parallel evolution, although we're now finding out it's also quite common. he's wrong about a lot of things).

I should further argue that finding the eye in this configuration "backwards" according to some, is really just applying human aesthetics about how things should be engineered, where biology is a combination of happenstance and optimization. I suspect, as we tease out the biophysics of the eye further, we will find many more examples of how Dawkins' simple logic (which isn't really logic, but more based on aesthetics and intuition) doesn't really explain things.