SUMMARY
A popular claim among advocates of anti-evolutionary models of origin is that Charles Darwin noted in Origin of Species that the processes of evolution and natural selection are not sufficient to bring about organs such as the eye. The quote as taken from Origins is as follows:
"To suppose that the eye, with all it's 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."
The use of this quote, however, is used as a "quote mine", a rhetorical strategy where someone uses part of a quote that seems to agree with their point but doesn't include context or leaves parts of the quote out of their citation. A great example of this sort of thing can be seen when theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, during a debate with philosopher William Lane Craig, selectively edited a portion of an email that had been sent to him by cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin in an attempt to bolster his own point against Craig's. Unbeknownst to Krauss, Craig had the information that Krauss had edited out, and, embarrassingly, pointed out the mining before a sizable audience. (Craig would later come to possess an original copy of the email from Vilenkin himself which showed without doubt that Krauss had deleted information that was harmful to his point and then lied about it to the audience)
The "mine" is revealed when one includes the rest of the quote that the initial section is taken from.
"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 prossessor, 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."
This lays to rest the first part of the claim, that Darwin did not believe that they eye could have been produced by natural selection and evolutionary processes. This is actually articulated forthrightly by young earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis (see: Mitchell, T. [2010] Didn't Darwin Call the Evolution of the Eye Absurd? Answers in Genesis.), which identifies the claim as a misrepresentation of Darwin's material that should not be made by advocates of creationist models of origin.
The spirit of the claim endures, however, in the form of a qualifier: that even though Darwin wasn't worried about what the eye meant for his theory and had proposed a predictive model concerning it, that model is contradicted by what we observe in the natural world, and that there are no processes such as the ones Darwin proposes that could create an organ like the eye. (a) (b) (c) (d) The response to these claims is rather underwhelming, in that it is simply not true. Darwin's predictive model is nearly identical to what has been discovered in the natural world, as the proceeding sources demonstrate.
Darwin predicts that, if the eye were formed by natural selection, then we would expect to be able to break the eye down, piece by piece, and find that every time we took something away, that the eye would still function in some useful or meaningful way, which is exactly what happens when you do break down the eye on a biomechanical level. Models of irreducible complexity do not take these data into account.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DNA Learning Center. (2009, June 23) The Eye and Irreducible Complexity - Creationism Debunked [Video]. YouTube. LINK.
Essilor UK. (2016, August 10) Irreducible Complexity? - Evolution of the Eye Explained [Video]. YouTube. LINK.
European Molecular Biology Laboratory. (2004, November 1) Darwin's Greatest Challenge Tackled: The Mystery of Eye Evolution. ScienceDaily. LINK.
Gonzalez, R. (2015, January 11) I'm Tired Of Seeing This Charles Darwin Quote Taken Out of Context. Gizmodo. LINK.
Isaak, Mark. (2007, February 18) CB921.1 : Half an eye. TalkOrigin's Index to Creationist Claims. LINK.
Isaak, Mark. (2004, September 14) CA113.1 : Evolution of the eye. TalkOrigin's Index to Creationist Claims. LINK.
Isaak, Mark. (2007, November 10) CB301 : Eye complexity. TalkOrigin's Index to Creationist Claims. LINK.
NewScientist. Evolution of the eye. LINK.
Novella, S. (2010, March 17) Eye Evolution and Irreducible Complexity. Neurologica. LINK.
PBS Evolution Library. (2001) Evolution of the Eye. LINK.
Relatively Interesting. (2019) Irreducible Complexity, Intelligent Design, Evolution, and The Eye. LINK.
Religion Debate. (2012, June 7) Richard Dawkins on Eye Evolution [Video]. YouTube. LINK.
Simon Fraser University. The Emergence and Complexity of Life - Can Complex Systems Evolve? The Eye. LINK.
Zimmer, C. (2011, March 1) In a Marine Worm's Eyes, the Theory of Evolution. The New York Times. LINK.
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