Darwin on the eye, why misquote?

Question

I've heard this alot in the last few days, people saying that Darwin thought the evolution of the eye was impossible:

"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."

I'm sure everyone who posts something like this knows that it is a misquote, the remainder being as follows:

"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. "

So my question is, what is your excuse for misquoting it and misleading people? Is it deliberate lying or just sheer ignorance?

Theopneustos: "Is Darwin your personal God?" You are an idiot. You know nothing about theories in science

The word theory, in the context of science, does not imply uncertainty. It means "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" (Barnhart 1948). In the case of the theory of evolution, the following are some of the phenomena involved. All are facts:
Life appeared on earth more than two billion years ago;
Life forms have changed and diversified over life's history;
Species are related via common descent from one or a few common ancestors;
Natural selection is a significant factor affecting how species change.
Many other facts are explained by the theory of evolution as well.

Creationism is neither theory nor fact; it is, at best, only an opinion. Since it explains nothing, it is scientifically useless.

Answer 1

Why put so much stock in one persons rhetoric. Is Darwin your personal God? He was just a man, who was obviously confused as made clear in your quote. "Absurd in the highest degree, but when I consider." He was unsure, and needed a rationale so as not to have to abandon his theory. "Theory" A set of circumstances that seem to fit the facts. But not a provable fact. Where did the first cell come from? What was its type?." How did it become alive to begin with? All unanswerable. But you believe as if you absolutely knew the answers. THAT IS CALLED BLIND FAITH. The world by wisdom knew not God.

Answer 2

Darwin s answering of possible objections to the human eye evolution is entirely speculative:"...if numerous gradations... can be shown to exist;...and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life,...make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light...". This is not science by even the wildest stretch of the imagination, and yet if a Creationist uses such speculative arguments (which does of course occur) it is most assuredly pointed out immediately. Why the double standard?

Answer 3

I've noticed a lot of misquotes... not just on Darwin either. Thomas Jefferson is another they misquote quite often. I think it's mainly because they are getting their info from websites that back up their religion and their opinion to begin with... instead of reading the works themselves. If you see a quote, cut n paste and do a search on it... Every time I do that, I get the website they take it from and it's always a religious site with very little or no references (I don't think they understand what "references" really are)

Answer 4

It's a common arguement used by the fundies against Darwin's theories. Those people have never read the whole book, or even tried to understand the theory of natural selection. They are just not interested, their minds are closed.

They also misquote the bible when it suits them, so to misquote an 'atheist' book is nothing to them!

Answer 5

It is the balliwick of the fundamentalist to omit that which goes against their personal belief. By omitting the second part, they have latched onto the means to claim that Darwin found flaws within evolution. Why is this surprising, these same people do this with the bible as well...

Answer 6

The way I see it, evolutionists put as much faith into evolution as I do into creationism. You can talk about proof all you want but there is still no firm conclusive evidence linking man to apes. There are many theories and many findings and studies that claim to prove it but not one actually can say "Here is your link, the grand connection to apes". People claim that fossils can get destroyed before even being found but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. Sounds like someone who has never seen God face to face but knows He is there. Everyone knows science is far from being fail proof, things thought impossible one hundred, or even 20 years ago are now commonplace. Theories put forward in the early 1900s are now changed, reversed, or just proven wrong. Nothing on earth is perfect not even science and try as you might you can never prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Answer 7

Sometimes it's deliberate lying, but generally it's because they copied and pasted the quote from some creationist website and that was the only part that the website mentioned.

Answer 8

I suspect they misquote it because they can. Misquotes are a brilliant way to lie to people.

YEC's, (Young Earth Creationists) maintain data mining websites where you can get lots of misquotes to 'disprove' evolution.

Ignore them.

Answer 9

From what I understand the eye (if it were designed) is rather poorly done.

It's back to front, we have blind spots, they deterioate rather easily. It's more complicated than it needs to be