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" To think the eye had evolved by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree." - Charles Darwin.
The quote is not just mangled (Darwin didn't express himself in bumper sticker sentences), it has been deliberately cut off to make it appear as if Charles Darwin expressed the exact opposite thought as the one he was trying to convey.
Here is the full quote (OoS is public domain):
Quote:
Originally Posted by ACTUAL Charles Darwin
Organs of extreme perfection and complication. 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 possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an 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, can hardly be considered real.
Quote-mining is a despicable practice, so please stop it. Bad Form.
Interesting discovery in Georgia eight years ago, these are the type of discussions that should occur in science classes.
Quote:
DMANISI, Georgia — The discovery eight years ago of a 1.8-million-year-old
skull of a human ancestor buried under a medieval Georgian village indicates our
family tree may have fewer branches than some believe, scientists say.
The skull, along with other partial remains previously found at the rural
site, offer a glimpse of a population of pre-humans of various sizes living at
the same time — something that scientists had not seen before in such an ancient
era.
For years, some scientists have said humans evolved from only one or two
species, much like a tree branches out from a trunk. Others say the process was
more like a bush, with several offshoots that went nowhere.
Natural selection an only occur when life already exists.
Not exactly true. Since the boundary between what is living and what is not living is entirely arbitrary, a vast amount of natural selection took place within a class of chemical reactions before "life already existed." Life is itself a product of natural selection, not a prerequisite.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Finn_Jarber
It is a theory of improvement, but you cannot improve something which does not already exist.
Absolutely false. Natural selection says nothing automatically about subjective value judgements such as "improvement." It is instead a theory of adaptation, an objective quality not a subjective one, and therefore it is at its core entirely non-directional. The primary direction of all evolutionary change is sideways, and only a small percentage of it drives in any vertical direction (either up or down) concerning subjective qualities such as "improvement."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Finn_Jarber
Also, assuming a fish came out of nowhere and started evolving, how did one fish knew to evolve wings and another one know to evolve hands and legs?
No "knowledge" is required, especially since evolution is not an intentional aspiration of any biological organism. It is instead a simple statistical, retrospective and contingent filtering of populations. It can have no forward view, but is determined entirely based on the population of organisms, their existing characteristics and their environment at that moment in time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Finn_Jarber
Don't you think humans could use wings AND arms and legs?
No actually. I can think of few adaptations that would be more useless to humans than wings.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Finn_Jarber
The truth is that the target, the blueprint, is in the DNA, not in some random accident.
Then its a very good thing that nothing about natural selection is dependent on "random accidents."
Last edited by HistorianDude; 10-18-2013 at 10:54 AM..
Quote-mining is a despicable practice, so please stop it. Bad Form.
It is in fact one of the foundational dishonest practices of the creationist movement. There can be few better examples of their deceptiveness and hypocrisy than in their willful disregard of the 8th Commandment.
Actually the scientists who believe in creation use science just like the those scientists who believe in evolution.
Sometimes. Not when defending creationism.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Finn_Jarber
Have you seen "Darwin's Dilemma"?
Yep. What about it?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Finn_Jarber
Veteran scientists like Simon Conway Morris, James Valentine, Paul Chien, Jonathan Wells, Richard Sternberg, Douglas Axe, Stephen Meyer and others use your own 'god', science, to provide evidence to prove species did not evolve the way you have been taught.
What hallucination would cause you to consider science a "god?" And what would cause you to imagine that theistic evolutionists like Simon Conway Morris offer any serious challenge to the theory of natural selection, or that they believe and have proved that "species did not evolve the way (we) have been taught?" You do know (I hope) that theistic evolutionists are not creationists. Right? And as to the Discovery Institute they had their day in court almost 10 years ago and couldn't deliver the goods.
Evolution is real whether you want to believe it or not. Evolution has been proven.
Creationism has not been proven.
BTW, evolution goes far beyond Darwinism. DNA wasn't even discovered until the 1950s. Nearly 70 years after Darwin died.
Get a clue.
I think that the part you are missed, is that you can believe in both. Something like god produced the spark of life with the intent that evolution take over to create everything else.
Kinda like "create the heavens and the earth", as we know the earth formed over billions of years of bits of space debris etc. coallesced.
It kinda all goes back to the big bang, which by every scientific measure IS the moment of creation.
Anyway, no doubt we lost you long ago.....get a clue.
I think that the part you are missed, is that you can believe in both. Something like god produced the spark of life with the intent that evolution take over to create everything else.
Kinda like "create the heavens and the earth", as we know the earth formed over billions of years of bits of space debris etc. coallesced.
It kinda all goes back to the big bang, which by every scientific measure IS the moment of creation.
Anyway, no doubt we lost you long ago.....get a clue.
One more time with feeling.....
The fact that you asked something so asinine proves you know virtually nothing about evolution. You're embarrassing yourself.
I think that the part you are missed, is that you can believe in both. Something like god produced the spark of life with the intent that evolution take over to create everything else.
Kinda like "create the heavens and the earth", as we know the earth formed over billions of years of bits of space debris etc. coallesced.
It kinda all goes back to the big bang, which by every scientific measure IS the moment of creation.
Anyway, no doubt we lost you long ago.....get a clue.
You can believe in both. However, hypotheses about the creation of the universe do not belong in Biology class. Biology deals with the study of life. It starts with the first cell and goes from there. How that cell got there is not part of the curriculum.
HistorianDude (and, in all modesty, myself) presented arguments. Are you going to address those? Oh, and are you going to correct your misleading Darwin quote?
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