Did Darwin question his own theory?

[Guest HIS girl]

"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 confess, absurd in the highest degree." -

- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.

"I am quite concious that my speculations run beyond the bounds of true science...it is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaw(s) & holes as sound parts." -

- Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, cited by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.

My questions are: Did Charles Darwin take his own theory as seriously as others did? Or was he more realistic in realising his theory was (and still is) a big question mark?

[leoxiii]

Not only that, but Darwin also stated (and I am not going wade through Origin of Species again to find the quotes) that the earth should yield an abundance of transitional fossils, and that if such an abundance of transitional fossils were not found his theory would be falsified.

Well, we are still waiting for some true transitional fossils. The ones put forward by the naturalists are highly debatable (e.g. whale), purely speculative (e.g. reptile to bird), and sometimes not even presented in the right order (e.g. the horse).

As far as I can tell, and according tot he great Darwin himself, his theory has been thoroughly falsified.

[Guest HIS girl]

Not only that, but Darwin also stated (and I am not going wade through Origin of Species again to find the quotes) that the earth should yield an abundance of transitional fossils, and that if such an abundance of transitional fossils were not found his theory would be falsified.

Well, we are still waiting for some true transitional fossils. The ones put forward by the naturalists are highly debatable (e.g. whale), purely speculative (e.g. reptile to bird), and sometimes not even presented in the right order (e.g. the horse).

As far as I can tell, and according tot he great Darwin himself, his theory has been thoroughly falsified.

Interesting.

I was thinking that today - that what we have been presented with are bones that are more ape like than skeletons showing a "true" transition occuring.

Another thing is - evolution takes "time"?

Would the earth with the *millions of years time passage still be ENOUGH time lapse for "true" evolution to occur?

*(I believe in a young earth).

[irishcowboy]

a theory, a theory, a theory.....

being a theory, there is nothing but questions..... no facts...... assumptions only........

like I have a theory that I can run an automobile by putting water in the tank.... no gass.....

the only thing is, I can do it on paper and IT IS FEASIBLE......

if we came from another species then why is that species still here????? why have we not changed into another species?????

petrified? well, there has been located a cat that was found petrified inside a tree that was less then 100 years old.....

there is a lot of stuff that happens that some think takes thousands and thousands and thousands of years to happen, but really only takes a short time.....

evolution, as is said to have happened is bogus..... NO PROOF......

there is more proof that Christ was walking the earth then Hitler....

mike

[Guest HIS girl]

Just think - if he were around today, would he rethink his theory or maybe rewrite certain aspects of it, since new revelations have emerged in science. ?

Food for thought.

[leoxiii]

Not only that, but Darwin also stated (and I am not going wade through Origin of Species again to find the quotes) that the earth should yield an abundance of transitional fossils, and that if such an abundance of transitional fossils were not found his theory would be falsified.

Well, we are still waiting for some true transitional fossils. The ones put forward by the naturalists are highly debatable (e.g. whale), purely speculative (e.g. reptile to bird), and sometimes not even presented in the right order (e.g. the horse).

As far as I can tell, and according tot he great Darwin himself, his theory has been thoroughly falsified.

Interesting.

I was thinking that today - that what we have been presented with are bones that are more ape like than skeletons showing a "true" transition occuring.

Another thing is - evolution takes "time"?

Would the earth with the *millions of years time passage still be ENOUGH time lapse for "true" evolution to occur?

*(I believe in a young earth).

The most forgiving calculations for determining the odds of the evolution of man from the chemical soup, place the number at 1 in 10 to the power of 60, that is a 10 followed by 60 zeros. That is a really big number. If we allow 15 billion years for the age of the universe (and I only allow that for the outermost stars), then the number of seconds that has passed since they went forth from the big ball of matter is 10 to the power of 18. That is also a really big number. But it is insignificant compared to 10 to the power of 60.

In other words, the odds of evolution happening are mathematically impossible.

[Guest HIS girl]

Not only that, but Darwin also stated (and I am not going wade through Origin of Species again to find the quotes) that the earth should yield an abundance of transitional fossils, and that if such an abundance of transitional fossils were not found his theory would be falsified.

Well, we are still waiting for some true transitional fossils. The ones put forward by the naturalists are highly debatable (e.g. whale), purely speculative (e.g. reptile to bird), and sometimes not even presented in the right order (e.g. the horse).

As far as I can tell, and according tot he great Darwin himself, his theory has been thoroughly falsified.

Interesting.

I was thinking that today - that what we have been presented with are bones that are more ape like than skeletons showing a "true" transition occuring.

Another thing is - evolution takes "time"?

Would the earth with the *millions of years time passage still be ENOUGH time lapse for "true" evolution to occur?

*(I believe in a young earth).

The most forgiving calculations for determining the odds of the evolution of man from the chemical soup, place the number at 1 in 10 to the power of 60, that is a 10 followed by 60 zeros. That is a really big number. If we allow 15 billion years for the age of the universe (and I only allow that for the outermost stars), then the number of seconds that has passed since they went forth from the big ball of matter is 10 to the power of 18. That is also a really big number. But it is insignificant compared to 10 to the power of 60.

In other words, the odds of evolution happening are mathematically impossible.

..Neat explaination!!

[Hal P]

HIS girl, you haven't read 'On The Origin of Species' have you? I can tell you haven't, you have just copied and pasted that from an anti-evolution source somewhere. If you had read it you would know that the paragraph after your first quote-mine says;

"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."

The letter from which the first half of the second quote ("I am quite conScious that my speculations run QUITE beyond the bounds of true science" - you could at least get the quotation correct!!!) comes can be read here - http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinlette...entry-2109.html

Darwin and Asa Grey were involved in a correspondence about extinctions of disjoined species, and he was not talking about evolution as a whole. Context is everything.

The second part of that quote ("It is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaws & holes as sound parts") is from an entirely different letter - http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinlette...entry-2466.html (WOW, you really haven't done much to look into the accuracy of these quotes, have you?).

Darwin was fairly uncertain about how exactly natural selection (his hypothesis) worked, and people had pointed out problems with it. He was of course correct to harbour such concerns as he knew nothing about genetics, or how heritable traits were passed on. His view of genetics as a form of blending, pangenesis, does make it hard to see how natural selection would work (see Fleeming Jenkin's criticisms), but that was eventually solved with the discovery of Mendelian genetics and its incorporation into modern evolutionary theory. However, despite his concerns about natural selection and its role in the process, there is no evidence that Darwin doubted his main ideas about evolution, what he called 'descent with modification', namely that living organisms were modified descendants of prior organisms and so were related through common ancestry.

Hope that clears that all up for you.

Edited October 10, 2009 by Hal P

[Guest HIS girl]

Thanks for clearing all that up for me Hal.

Do you think if Darwin was here today - he'd still stand by his theory of evolution?

ps - I didn't copy and paste the quotes by the way - typed it long hand. The quotes I read were exactly as I put forth here.

[leoxiii]

Hope that clears that all up for you.

The theory of evolution still remains a theory that reads more like Rudyard Kipling fable than a scientific theory.