Do people know that saying Charles Darwin recanted on his deathbed doesn't debunk Evolution?

Question

Do people understand that wether or not Charles Darwin did anything or even lived has nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution?

I keep reading this on yahoo answers, that Charles Darwin said something on his deathbed and that means Evolution is false.

Do people know that isn't true? Or are they like, injured in their brains?

Answer 1

whatever, hey JD!
have you not the cognitive reasoning skills to comprehend, that the theory of evolution debunks itself?

the only thing I can figure about you, is that you must be between the age of 18 and 29.
Your ability to reason has apparently been severely impaired from the church of evolution.
Try this just for once, ask yourself,"why would life evolve?"
There is absolutely no need for life to create itself from nothing.
Really, just ponder that for a day or two!


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Answer 2

Darwin Recanted

Answer 3

I've heard that to and for the life of me I can't understand why it would make any difference that a dying man supposedly made a statement supporting the very thing he denied all his life. Even the most horrible murderer, once he is strapped into the electric chair, will swear he didn't do it because he thinks it will save his pitiful life for a few more days. People on their death beds with their minds and bodies either too old, too feeble or too diseased will try to find the last way to hold off death. Like it is going to make any difference at that point. Darwin only started people thinking about evolution, he wasn't the sole owner of the idea, others came along and did their own THINKING about the subject.
I think the reason that Christian like to tell this story is that they just have to let you know that they got another convert, even if it was only for a few seconds or minutes.

Answer 4

"The story of Darwin's recanting is not true. Shortly after Darwin's death, Lady Hope told a gathering that she had visited Darwin on his deathbed and that he had expressed regret over evolution and had accepted Christ. However, Darwin's daughter Henrietta, who was with him during his last days, said Lady Hope never visited during any of Darwin's illnesses, that Darwin probably never saw her at any time, and that he never recanted any of his scientific views (Clark 1984, 199; Yates 1994). "

"The story would be irrelevant even if true. The theory of evolution rests upon reams of evidence from many different sources, not upon the authority of any person or persons."

Answer 5

Like Charles Darwin was the only one to come up with the theory. He just got published first as he found out someone else was doing the research and wanted to beat them to the punch. And then it has been studied and the mechanism better understood by thousands of scientist in many different fields. It's not like just one person said "let there be
evolution" and everyone just blindly followed him.

Answer 6

We can't fault him for it if the claim is true. The fear of imminent death can make people do crazy things. LOL
Besides, you're right, it doesn't change the fact that the evidence is there. That Australopithicus report from your link in a previous question is great proof for evolution, and poor Charlie Darwin never even got a chance to see it.

Answer 7

I do not believe it debunks evolution but i do believe that it puts some small holes in the credibility of his research which is being relied upon by the modern day evolutionists it is as though George bush would say there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq it would not change the fact that Saddam Hussein needed to be dethroned or that the country supported ism it only changes the basis for the war which in turn changes the tactics needed to be used all Darwin's research must be done over to
clarify that his position was valid

Answer 8

Let's face it. Jesus is just a first century urban legend gone wild. The kind of people that give credence to unsubstantiated tales also have no problem spreading along outright lies without ever exerting themselves to confirm the truth of what they were told.

I have this friend, like a retarded little brother to me, who believes everything he hears repeated in church, despite that he's repeatedly burned with BS stories he later finds out are completely false. But in a religion built on tales of the fantastic and outright gossip, everybody is always trying to outdo everyone else with their latest tall tale of the miraculous, and he wants to see life as miraculous so bad, and wants to be part of God's battle plan so bad (because his own father has never given him the approval he craves) that he's utterly gullible and jumps on every story as proof Jesus, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are all real. It's kept him in perpetual childhood.

I see that a lot among fundamentalists where their development arrested before they ever reached maturity and responsible adulthood, and it's expressed with God becoming a replacement parent from whom they continue to seek the approval they never got from mommy and daddy. The men especially never become men and they wonder why their wives don't "respect" them and "submit to their authority" and end up leaving them, and they just don't get it when they find out the real topic of the women's Bible study is how sad and pathetic their husbands are.

In short, it's not a brain injury, but it is a developmental disorder, and it is in full evidence with the above posts which drip with ignorance and misinformation from people who are simply stupid and uninformed, but beaming with pride over how stupid and uninformed they are.

Answer 9

It's FLAT, flat I tell you! The world is FLAT!

; ) There is much about Darwin & evolution that is horribly misunderstood by the undereducated masses in our society. And they fear what they don't know or understand. I am sure that there isn't any conspiracy to teach all the college students in the world a lie though!

Answer 10

Darwin’s finches
Evidence supporting rapid post-Flood adaptation
by Carl Wieland

Thirteen species of finches live on the Galápagos, the famous island group visited by Charles Darwin in the 1830s. The finches have a variety of bill shapes and sizes, all suited to their varying diets and lifestyles. The explanation given by Darwin was that they are all the offspring of an original pair of finches, and that natural selection is responsible for the differences.

Surprisingly to some, this is the explanation now held by most modern creationists. It would not need to be an ‘evolutionary’ change at all, in the sense of giving any evidence for amoeba-to-man transformation. No new genetic information would have been introduced. If the parent population has sufficient created variability (genetic potential) to account for these varied features in its descendants, natural selection could take care of the resulting adaptation, as a simplistic example will show.

Say some finches ended up on islands in which there was a shortage of seeds, but many grubs were living under tree bark. In a population with much variation, some will have longer, some shorter, beaks than average. Those birds carrying more of the ‘long-beak’ information could survive on those grubs, and thus would be more likely to pass the information on to their descendants, while the others would die out. In this way, with selection acting on other characters as well, a ‘woodpecker finch’ could arise.

The same thing is seen in artificial selection, with all the various modern breeds of dogs being more specialized than the parent (mongrel) population, but carrying less information—and thus less potential for further selection (you can’t breed Great Danes from Chihuahuas). In all these sorts of changes, finches are still finches and dogs are dogs. The limits to change are set by the amount of information originally present from which to select.

Creationists have long proposed such ‘splitting under selection’ from the original kinds, explaining for example wolves, coyotes, dingoes and other wild dogs from one pair on the Ark. The question of time has, however, been seized upon by anti-creationists. They insist that it would take a much longer time than Scripture allows. Artificial selection is quick, they admit, but that is because breeders are deliberately acting on each generation. The usual ‘guesstimate’ of how long it took for Darwin’s finches to radiate from their parent population ranges from one million to five million years.

However, Princeton zoology professor Peter Grant recently released some results of an intensive 18-year study of all the Galápagos finches during which natural selection was observed in action.1 For example, during drought years, as finches depleted the supply of small seeds, selection favoured those with larger, deeper beaks capable of getting at the remaining large seeds and thus surviving, which shifted the population in that direction.

While that is not very surprising, nor profound, the speed at which these changes took places was most interesting. At that observed rate, Grant estimates, it would take only 1,200 years to transform the medium ground finch into the cactus finch, for example. To convert it into the more similar large ground finch would take only some 200 years.

Notice that (although the article fails to mention it) such speedy changes can have nothing to do with the production of any new genes by mutation, but are based upon the process described, that is, choosing from what is already there. It therefore fails to qualify as evidence for real, uphill (macro) evolution — though many starry-eyed students will doubtless be taught it as ‘evolution in action’.

Instead, it is real, observed evidence that such (downhill) adaptive formation of several species from the one created kind can easily take place in a few centuries. It doesn't need millions of years. The argument is strengthened by the fact that, after the Flood, selection pressure would have been much more intense—with rapid migration into new, empty niches, residual catastrophism and changing climate as the Earth was settling down and drying out, and simultaneous adaptive radiation of differing food species.

Reference
P.R. Grant, ‘Natural Selection and Darwin’s Finches’, Scientific American, 265(4):60–65, October 1991.