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(On Sat, 11 May 1996, Ed Conrad wrote to talk.origins, etc., in
response to Michael Clark's accusation that he had used only
a portion of Charles Darwin's quote in which he expressed
serious doubts about the evolution of the eye:
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The Ed Conrad Hurry-Up-I-Have-to-Catch-a-Train Version:
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Quote:
> ``To suppose that the eye (with so many parts all working together) . . .
> could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess,
> absurd in the highest degree."
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The Charles Darwin Let-Me-Put-You-To-Sleep Version:
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Quote:
>"'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 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. How a nerve comes to be
>sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself
>originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in
>which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it
>does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their
>sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves,
> endowed with this special sensibility."
> [Darwin, 1859, _The Origin of Species
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I thought I said what Darwin had said but Dave Iain Greig at
Ediacara U., a colleague of mine at Ediacara University,
said what I said wasn't what Darwin said because he said Darwin said
something more than what I said he said, then Steve Vickers of UK
sends an E-Mail and said he knows what Darwin said, which is not
entirely what I said he said, so I said to myself, ` I'll say what
he said Darwin said even though I don't know if he really said it,
since this is what he said he had said.
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Quote:
> Nice little song and dance, there, Zippy. Can you balance
> a ball on your nose? ---- Michael Clark
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Actually, Michael, it doesn't really matter what Darwin said or what
these fellas said he said -- or what they said I didn't say -- since
what I said, whether Darwin said it or not, isn't something that was
vital to say, and I'm sort of saying he had painted himself into a
corner and said what he thought he'd better say, else critics would
say he really had nothing to say, even though he had said it.
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Wonder what Darwin Would'ver Said About This:
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Quote:
> PETRIFIED BONES IN GIANT SLAB OF SLATE (COAL VEINS)I
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It means the bones have to be older than the material in which
they are encased..
Same as many thousands of other petrified bones, teeth
and soft organs I've discovered between anthracite veins,
they offer the undeniable physical evidence that large land
animals -- man included -- had existed on earth while
coal was being formed some280 million years ago..
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Quote:
> PSEUDOS' DENIAL OF PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
> (Petrified coal-age bones, teeth and soft organs)
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Quote:
> http://www.***.com/
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Quote:
Ed Conrad
> http://www.***.com/
> Man as Old as Coal
DARWIN SAID A MOUTHFUL -- eye, Eye, EYE..