Claim CA113.1:
Charles Darwin acknowledged the inadequacy of evolution when he 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. (Darwin 1872)
Source:
Huse, Scott. 1996. The Collapse of Evolution. Grand Rapids: Baker
Book
House, p. 73.
Response:
- The quote is taken out of context. Darwin answered the seeming problem
he introduced. 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. (Darwin 1872, 143-144)
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.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/part8.html
CARM. n.d. Charles Darwin comments on the human eye.
http://www.carm.org/evo_questions/darwineye.htm
References:
created 2001-2-18, modified 2004-9-14