A PRECAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT MISQUOTING SCIENTISTS

Charles Darwin wrote,

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting
the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light,
and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been
formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible
degree. [Darwin1872]

Source:

Griffith, Michael T. (ed.), 1997. Why the eye refutes evolution. From Marshall
and Sandra Hall, 1975. The Truth: God or Evolution?, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, pp.
112-113, http://ourworld-top.cs.com/mikegriffith1/id102.htm or http://karws
.gso.uri.edu/JFK/the_critics/griffith/Eye_Refutes_Evolution.html
Finnan, Dennis L., n.d., The eyes have it. http://www.wwy.org/wwy3696.html

Response:

The paragraph continues,

. . . . Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and
complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its
possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly,
and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation
or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions
of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could
be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be
considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns
us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several
facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light,
and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound. [Da
rwin1872]

Darwin continues with three more pages describing a sequence of plausible intermediate
stages between eyelessness and human eyes, giving examples from existing organisms
to show that the intermediates are viable.

Links:

Babinski, E. T., n.d. An old, out of context quotation. http://www.talkorig
ins.org/faqs/ce/3/part8.html

CARM, n.d. Charles Darwin comments on the human eye. http://www.carm.org/ev
o_questions/darwineye.htm

References:

Darwin, C., 1872. The Origin of Species, 6th ed. London: Senate, chpt. 6, http://w
ww.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin/chapter6.html or http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/
chapter-06.html

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