Can anyone explain this?

Question

Jim Darwin in his book, in his book, said it is absurd to think that the eye, which all of its great functions, to think that it could evolve. It is so complex. This is straight form his "origins" book. He admitted it had to have been created, and not evolve.

Answer 1

You are mistaken and your statements are misleading. The quote in full reads: "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. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound."

From http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:bHVARw277XMJ:www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html+Darwin+evolution+eye&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2


Through natural selection, different types of eyes have emerged in evolutionary history -- and the human eye isn't even the best one, from some standpoints. Because blood vessels run across the surface of the retina instead of beneath it, it's easy for the vessels to proliferate or leak and impair vision. So, the evolution theorists say, the anti-evolution argument that life was created by an "intelligent designer" doesn't hold water: If God or some other omnipotent force was responsible for the human eye, it was something of a botched design.

Biologists use the range of less complex light sensitive structures that exist in living species today to hypothesize the various evolutionary stages eyes may have gone through.

Here's how some scientists think some eyes may have evolved: The simple light-sensitive spot on the skin of some ancestral creature gave it some tiny survival advantage, perhaps allowing it to evade a predator. Random changes then created a depression in the light-sensitive patch, a deepening pit that made "vision" a little sharper. At the same time, the pit's opening gradually narrowed, so light entered through a small aperture, like a pinhole camera.

Every change had to confer a survival advantage, no matter how slight. Eventually, the light-sensitive spot evolved into a retina, the layer of cells and pigment at the back of the human eye. Over time a lens formed at the front of the eye. It could have arisen as a double-layered transparent tissue containing increasing amounts of liquid that gave it the convex curvature of the human eye.

In fact, eyes corresponding to every stage in this sequence have been found in existing living species. The existence of this range of less complex light-sensitive structures supports scientists' hypotheses about how complex eyes like ours could evolve. The first animals with anything resembling an eye lived about 550 million years ago. And, according to one scientist's calculations, only 364,000 years would have been needed for a camera-like eye to evolve from a light-sensitive patch. >

Answer 2

... Jim Darwin? Do you mean Charles Darwin?

Anyway, I don't think that Charles Darwin had the proper knowledge with which to truly evaluate the eye at the time. The eye, though a seemingly overwhelmingly complex body part, is simply a development of other more simple things. Even the most basic of plants can have light-sensing mechanisms. They simply needed to be more and more complex as life came out from its origins in the dark ocean to live on land.

Answer 3

There is a user on this site by the name of Jim Darwin... I presume you are confusing him with the great biologist, Charles Darwin.

Also, Darwin does not say anywhere in the Origin of Species (not "origins") that the eye had to be created. That is simply not true. Can you show me the quote perhaps? Or is it the case that you actually haven't read the book (surprise, surprise).

Go and learn some science.

Answer 4

Do you mean Charles Darwin and "Origin of the Species." ? Maybe you've been on this site too long.
I haven't read that entire book so don't know what you are referring to in your question.
Since you bring up the eye I'll just give you something to ponder:
is it not amazing how our physical bodies are designed to respond to differing levels of pressure. The bottom of your feet can take quite a beating while a speck of lint in your eye is intensely painful. A bug flew into my eye last night as I was walking and it hurt! I think we are amazing creatures.

Answer 5

Of course, you meant Charles Darwin. I will just excuse that gaff as a moment of cerebral flatulence, and let it pass.

Your assertion that "He (Darwin) admitted it (the eye)had to have been created, and not evolve." is a bald-faced LIE."

Now... Darwin's comment about the eye. You have fallen victim to a tactic that is quite popular with the 'Liars For Jesus' (LFJ) web sites... it is called 'quote mining'. The statement that you have just quoted is one of the most famous examples. What they do is find something that a scientist said... but they LEAVE OUT important parts that would change the entire meaning, if taken in context. In this case, Darwin DID say what you referred to... but your source managed to leave out the following paragraph, and the following THREE PAGES, in which Darwin SPELLED OUT the perfectly reasonable and logical steps through which such a complex organ COULD evolve via natural selection... DESPITE the seeming absurdity of the idea. (http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA113_1.html) If you were to read that paragraph and the following paragraphs TOGETHER, and in context, you would see that this is one of many very powerful arguments and observations that ADD TO the credibility of eolution.

You are being duped. Your religious puppet masters KNOW that believers are, for the most part, scientifically ignorant, and they KNOW that believers are not inclined to seek scientific information from genuine scientific sources. Because of that, they KNOW that they can lie to you and mislead you with impunity... and you fall for it.

Answer 6

Nobody said the guy was a genius or anything, or had all the answers. He just developed the idea of evolution and brought it to the scientific table, so to speak. My thoughts on evolution are not based on Darwin's book.

Answer 7

Who is Jim Darwin? Any relation to Charles Darwin?

Answer 8

This is the old "watchmaker" argument for the existence of God. When you find a watch in a forest, it makes more sense to presume that it was created by someone, rather than spontaneously came into existence. The Intelligent Design is just an updated version of this argument.

Answer 9

I've heard of Charles Darwin....
Who's Jim Darwin?

Answer 10

heres another thing...bioligists found a complex forrmed plant fossil and dated it all the way back to near the beginning of the earth's creation...saying such complex plant never evolved but was simply created like that from the very beginning from what other scientists speculated that it should have taken millions of years to evolve.