Charles DarwinCharles Darwin, (1809-1882)

Charles Darwin Quote

“To suppose that the eye [...] 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.”

Charles DarwinCharles Darwin
~ Charles Darwin


Ratings and Comments


Christopher Cobb

If only those variations of the eye did exist. Nothing is more enticing than a lie built on presupposed evidence.

T. McKinney, Dublin

Did you know that the eye has 40,000,000 nerve endings, the focusing muscles move an estimated 100,000 times a day, and the retina contains 137,000,000 light sensitive cells?

Sarolta, Amsterdam

We see those variations everywhere in nature - eyes without blind spots (octopuses), eyes that see more colours than we do (some birds, Mantis shrimp), cells that only detect the presence of light (remember, seeing is detecting light, nothing more), eyes that are holes with light sensitive cells so the animal knows where the light comes from and within species we find variations too - some humans are colour blind, some see better than others, we have different cone photoreceptor packing density and we have a huge variation in eye colours (all these are variations!), but because our 'tribes' keep interbreeding and it takes a huge time for a species to grow apart even if they are isolated I doubt that we would see a HumankindA who has different eyes than HumankindB and can't have kids with HumankindB (speciation) in the future.

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