Clearing up what Darwin had said -- Evolution of the Eye

Ed Conrad

2003-08-10 11:23:11 UTC

WHAT DARWIN REALLY SAID -- OR DIDN'T SAY!
There is an important matter here that has to be cleared up. It's
what Charles Darwin said. or didn't say.
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I have been accused of using only a portion of Darwin's quote
in which he expressed serious doubts about the evolution of the eye.
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Therefore, this clarification is is order.
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The Ed Conrad Speeded-Up Version:
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``To suppose that the eye (with so many parts all working together) . . .
could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess,
absurd in the highest degree."

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The Rock-Me-to-Sleep Version:
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'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 degree. When it was first said
that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common
sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of
Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted
in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple
and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist,
each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if
further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is
likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to
any 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, should not be
considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be
sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself
originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in
which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it
does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their
sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves,
endowed >with this special sensibility.'
[Darwin, 1859, _The Origin of Species_]

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I thought I said what Darwin had said but Dave Greig at Ediacara U.
said what I said wasn't what Darwin had said because he said Darwin
had said something more than what I said he had said, then Steve
Vickers in England sends an e-mail and said HE knows what Darwin
had said, which is not entirely what I said he had said, so I said to
myself, "I'll say what he said Darwin had said even though I don't
know if he really had said it, since this is what he said he had
said."
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In other words, it really doesn't matter what Darwin had said or what
these fellas said he had said -- or what they said I didn't say --
since what I had said, whether Darwin said it or not, isn't something
that was vital to say, and I'm sort of saying Darwin had painted
himself into a corner when he said what he thought he should say,
else critics laer would say he really had really nothing to say, even
though he had said it.

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Meanwhile, I wonder what Darwin would've say about these:
(all found between coal veins in Pennsylvania)

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*petrified bones, teeth and even soft organs (some human)
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Ed Conrad

http://www.edconrad.com

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Man as Old as Coal