Let us look at some of the statements of Charles Darwin that reveal the most about his mind, character and reasoning.
#1: "I suppose 'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded."
Darwin made this confession in a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860. He thereby confessed that the term "natural selection" was a confusing and inappropriate term. Similarly, in the 1869 version of The Origin of Species, Darwin confessed that "in the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term." The word "selection" refers to choice by a conscious agent, but no such thing occurs in so-called "natural selection"; so the term has always been a misleading one.
#2: "This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection."
Darwin made this statement on page 72 of The Origin of Species. The statement is revealing because it shows how tissue-thin his theory was. His theory was not a theory of organization, but a theory so slight it could be written on the slip inside a fortune cookie, with a slogan such as "lucky things can happen, and such luck can be preserved."
#3: "Natural selection can do nothing until favourable variations chance to occur."
Darwin made this statement on page 144 of The Origin of Species. In general in that book, Darwin is very careful to avoid stating that his theory is centered on the idea of miracles of luck occurring. In The Origin of Species he very carefully avoided using the words "luck" and "fortune." But in this statement he lets his guard slip and lets us know that his theory is all centered upon lucky events: favorable variations that "chance to occur." We now have very good reasons for believing that the kind of miracles of luck he presumed could never have occurred. Most types of useful biological innovations require novel arrangements of matter so improbable that we would not expect them to occur by chance even given trillions of years of random mutations. Being something comparable to a typing monkey producing a well-written useful paragraph of 300 words, the origin of a single novel protein molecule (consisting of hundreds of well-arranged amino acid parts) would require an event with a probability of less than 1 in ten to the two hundredth power. No event so lucky would ever be expected to occur even if there were trillions of years of random mutations occurring on trillions of planets. The age of the universe is believed to be merely 13 billion years. Inside each of our bodies are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each its own complex invention.
#4: "He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation. He will be forced to admit that the close resemblance of the embryo of man to that, for instance, of a dog—the construction of his skull, limbs and whole frame on the same plan with that of other mammals, independently of the uses to which the parts may be put—the occasional reappearance of various structures, for instance of several muscles, which man does not normally possess, but which are common to the Quadrumana—and a crowd of analogous facts—all point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor."
This statement appeared on page 927 of Darwin's book The Descent of Man. It is his grand summary statement in which he gives his best evidence that man and other lower species have a common ancestor. The statement is notable for its extreme weakness as evidence. Why would anyone think that an alleged resemblance between the unformed blob of a dog embryo and the unformed blob of a human embryo would do anything to show that humans and dogs had a common ancestor? Why would anyone think that a mere physical resemblance between the shape of a man and the shape of an ape would do anything to show that the two have a common ancestor? We know of all kinds of things that have similar shapes, but no common ancestors. Why would anyone think that a claimed "occasional reappearance" of some muscles would do anything to show that men and other animals have the same ancestor?
#5: "My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties."
This extremely glaring falsehood was told by Darwin on page 99 of The Descent of Man. The statement shows that Charles Darwin was either a very big liar or someone who was enormously self-deluded. It is a very obvious fact of human experience that there are the most gigantic fundamental differences between the mental faculties of man and other higher mammals. We should have no confidence in anyone claiming the opposite.
#6: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
Darwin made this appalling racist statement in Chapter VI of The Descent of Man. He predicted the extermination of what he called "the savage races," including blacks and Australian aborigines, and expressed no remorse about such a thing, suggesting such humans were closer to gorillas. Erroneous racism was a key element of early Darwinism. Darwinists such as Thomas Huxley tried to make the giant gulf between apes and humans look not so gigantic by depicting some groups of humans as inferior and closer to the apes.
#7: "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated ; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination : we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every cne to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
Darwin made these cruel remarks on page 205 of The Descent of Man. We see here some of the toxic moral results of his philosophy emphasizing concepts of "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest." For a full discussion of such toxic moral results, see my post "The Poisonous Effects of the 'Struggle for Life' Ideology."
#8: "It has often been asserted, but the assertion is quite incapable of proof, that the amount of variation under nature is a strictly limited quantity."
Darwin made this statement on page 360 of The Origin of Species. The statement misleadingly claimed that we have no proof that the amount of variation in nature is limited. We do indeed have such proof, in the form of thousands of years of observations of different species that have shown only very limited variation. Since 3000 BC mankind has observed billions of humans, and have never seen any human born with some visible novel physical innovation that no previous human ever had, such as some functional new organ or some functional new appendage. Humans look the same today as they did in 5000 BC, and we know from the writings of Plato thousands of years ago that humans back then had all of the mental powers we have today.
From such observations we know that the amount of beneficial variation in species is extremely limited. In no generation of any species do we see some individual organism born with some complex new biological innovation never before seen in that species, nor do we ever see any individual organism born with a half or a third of some complex new biological innovation. Such a very severe limit to biological variation was a well-established observation of cardinal importance to the claims Darwin was making. But rather than acknowledging such a fact of observation, he misleadingly tried to deny it by claiming that such a fact was "quite incapable of proof." We now know some of the reasons why we never see any organism born with a new type of organ or useful appendage that was never before seen in its species. One of the reasons is that such things would require a sudden bonanza of new biological information that would never occur by chance variation, any more than a new five-page philosophical essay would appear from the action of typing monkeys.
Darwinism apologists have tended to follow his strategy in this regard: vaguely talk again and again about natural variation, without ever mentioning the known severe limits of variation, and leave their readers with the impression that new wonders of biological innovation and new marvels of biological organization can arise through mere "variation" This is a very misleading approach. Similar rhetoric would occur if you were to vaguely say that there are variations in human jumping ability and to then imply that therefore some humans should be able to jump to the top of tall skyscraper towers, without ever mentioning how limited are the variations that occur in human jumping ability.
#9: " I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."
This statement by Darwin on page 184 of the first edition of The Origin of Species shows Darwin's almost boundless credulity in regard to imagining evolutionary transitions, no matter how ludicrous they sounded. The statement also is an example of the silly argumentative technique Darwin used throughout the book, which was the simple technique of saying something along the lines that he "saw no difficulty" or that "there is no real difficulty" in some event or transition, no matter how enormously improbable such an event or transition sounded. Just repeating over and over again that you see no difficulty in something is not any argumentation of any weight. Similarly, if a new high school graduate tells his parents that his career plan is to become a street beggar, and he hopes to get a winning lottery ticket as a donation, that person is not presenting argumentation of any weight if he just keeps saying things like, "I see no difficulty in my plan."
#10: " Until reading an able and valuable article in the North British Review (June, 1867), I did not appreciate how rarely single variations, whether slight or strongly marked, could he perpetuated."
In this quote, Darwin confesses that his reasoning in the original version of The Origin of Species was based on the naive idea that when a favorable variation occurred in an organism, it would typically be passed on to its descendants. We now why that would very rarely be true. Below is a quote that explains why:
"Moreover, even when an individual possessing some favourable variation does survive, it will be prevented from becoming the ancestor of a new species or race by the fact that, among the higher animals, every one which is born has two parents, while, by the hypothesis, the favourable variation is found in only one; and as the offspring are, on the average, of intermediate character between the two parents, the favourable variation will be transmitted to the offspring in only half its original force ; and to their offspring again, with only one-half of this, or one-fourth of its original force — and so on, constantly weakening."
#11: "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."
Darwin made this statement on page 150 of The Origin of Species. He then tried to extract himself from this difficulty in the space of a single sentence, by stating this in the next sentence: "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." This failed to credibly remove the difficulty that had been raised. The statement involves a number of fallacies, such as these:
(1) It was utterly erroneous to assume that there ever could have existed any such thing as an eye "very imperfect and simple." Now that we know that eyes are built from incredibly organized things called cells, and that cells are built from hugely organized things called organelles, and that organelles are built from gigantically organized things called protein molecules, we can understand how utterly erroneous it was to appeal to the existence of a "simple" eye. Every eye in every organism is an incredibly complex arrangement of many millions of well-arranged parts.
(2) It was utterly erroneous to assume that there could be "numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor." A series of steps can make a simple and very imperfect thing into a perfect and very complex thing, but this in general cannot be done through a series of changes that is each useful. Such a series of steps will require many steps that are not immediately useful, and that may be detrimental until the development process has progressed much further. Such a progression will typically require passing through non-functional intermediates. The concept is illustrated in the visual below. A functional Stop sign can be converted to a functional Tow Zone sign through a series of three steps; but in the middle of such a transitional are non-functional intermediates.
eye with no lens -->eye with very bad lens --> eye with slightly good lens -->eye with good lens
- "Light-absorption converts 11-cis retinal to all-trans-retinal, activating rhodopsin.
- Activated rhodopsin catalyzes replacement of GDP by GTP on transducin (T), which then disassociates into Ta-GTP and Tby.
- Ta-GTP activates cGMP phosphodiesterase (PDE) by binding and removing its inhibitory subunit (I).
- Active PDE reduces [cGMP] to below the level needed to keep cation channels open.
- Cation channels close, preventing influx of Na+ and Ca2+; membrane is hyperpolarized. This signal passes to the brain.
- Continued efflux of Ca2+ through the Na+-Ca2+ exchanger reduces cytosolic [Ca2+].
- Reduction of [CA2+] activates guanylyl cyclase (CG) and inhibits PDE; [cGMP] rises toward 'dark' level, reopening cation channels and returning Vm to prestimulus level.
- Rhodopsin kinase (RK) phosphorylates 'bleached' rhodopsin; low [Ca2+] and recoverin (Recov) stimulate this reaction. Arrestin (Arr) binds phosphorylated carboxyl terminus, reactivating rhodopsin.
- Slowly, arrestin dissociates, rhodopsin is dephosphorylated, and all-trans-retinal is replaced with 11-cis-retinal. Rhodopsin is ready for another phototransduction cycle."
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