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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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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:

  1. 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:

  1. Darwin, C. 1872. The Origin of Species, 6th ed. London: Senate, chpt. 6, http://www.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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created 2001-2-18, modified 2004-9-14