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From: LARRY SITES To: ALL May-23-94 16:33:00 Subject: Mark Fox misquotes Hey everybody, remember all those quotes from Mark? He even claims this one shows that Darwin didn't believe his own theory: Let me give you a quote from Dr Darwin 859, pg 186 of Origin of the Species "To suppose that the eye...could be formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree...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." Now let's look at what was actually written. I went to the library and checked out _The Illistrated Origin of the Species Abridged by Richard E. Leakey. Mark did not specify which edition his "quote" is from but Leakey used the sixth. I found the quote on page 111. I've enclosed the missing parts in brackets: "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 correction of spherical and chromatic aberration] could be formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree [. But when it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false. 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, and if the eye varies and the variations be inherited,] then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection should not be considered as subversive of the theory." He then goes on for over a page showing the "numerious gradations" and how "usefull" they are, thus showing that the precieved difficulty is in fact not real. Well, what do you know, we got us another bonafide LIAR FOR THE LORD!

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