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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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``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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"'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