bill@utastro.UUCP (William H. Jefferys) (08/12/85)
Being back in my office today, I finally have access to my copy of *Origin of Species*. Here's the original posting: > 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 confess, absurd in the highest degree. Here's the rest of the paragraph, which Creationists always leave out: "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." *Origin of Species*, Mentor Edition, pp. 168-169. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether the original poster quoted Darwin out of context. I am glad to see that Paul Dubois thinks so, though I naturally disagree with some of Paul's other comments. But the two of us have already beaten this topic to death quite some time ago, and I see no reason to revive *that* discussion! -- "Men never do evil so cheerfully and so completely as when they do so from religious conviction." -- Blaise Pascal Bill Jefferys 8-% Astronomy Dept, University of Texas, Austin TX 78712 (USnail) {allegra,ihnp4}!{ut-sally,noao}!utastro!bill (uucp) bill%utastro.UTEXAS@ut-sally.ARPA (ARPANET)