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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