The 11 Most Revealing Statements of Charles Darwin

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. 

In the case of the eye, we can easily think of a non-functional intermediate. If we imagine an eye without a lens evolving into an eye with a lens, we must first imagine some very imperfect lens. But such a lens would not improve vision, but worsen it. So the progression would go like this, with the middle part being a degradation in performance:

eye with no lens -->eye with very bad lens --> eye with slightly good lens -->eye with good lens

Here is a description of the immensely complicated light-capturing biochemistry going on in the eye, from a biochemistry textbook. The rhodopsin mentioned is a protein molecule with 348 very well-arranged amino acid parts.  The recoverin mentioned is a protein molecule with 200 very well-arranged amino acid parts. The arrestin mentioned is a protein with more than 400 very well-arranged amino acid parts. Altogether this biochemistry requires many thousands of atoms arranged in just the right way. 

1. "Light-absorption converts 11-cis retinal to all-trans-retinal, activating rhodopsin.
2. Activated rhodopsin catalyzes replacement of GDP by GTP on transducin (T), which then disassociates into T_a-GTP and T_by.
3. T_a-GTP activates cGMP phosphodiesterase (PDE) by binding and removing its inhibitory subunit (I).
4. Active PDE reduces [cGMP] to below the level needed to keep cation channels open.
5. Cation channels close, preventing influx of Na⁺ and Ca2⁺; membrane is hyperpolarized. This signal passes to the brain.
6. Continued efflux of Ca²⁺ through the Na⁺-Ca2⁺ exchanger reduces cytosolic [Ca²⁺].
7. Reduction of [CA²⁺] activates guanylyl cyclase (CG) and inhibits PDE; [cGMP] rises toward  'dark'  level, reopening cation channels and returning V_m to prestimulus level.
8. Rhodopsin kinase (RK) phosphorylates 'bleached' rhodopsin; low [Ca²⁺] and recoverin (Recov) stimulate this reaction. Arrestin (Arr) binds phosphorylated carboxyl terminus, reactivating rhodopsin.
9. Slowly, arrestin dissociates, rhodopsin is dephosphorylated, and all-trans-retinal is replaced with 11-cis-retinal. Rhodopsin is ready for another phototransduction cycle."

After studying such complexities, which Darwin knew nothing about, we may realize how bogus are all claims that Darwin did something to explain the appearance of mammal eyes by imagining a progression from a "simple eye" (something which has never existed in nature, all eyes being vastly complex). The text above mentions proteins that are far more structurally complicated than a primitive eye, such as a rhodopsin protein specified in a gene that uses 1000+ base pairs to specify the protein. Such proteins would have had to be part of even the simplest eye, which helps to debunk Darwin's idea that nature could have started out with some eye that was simple and easy to arise. 

If so simple a transition as a transition from a Stop sign to a "Tow Zone" sign requires passing through two nonfunctional intermediates, as shown in the visual above,  how many nonfunctional intermediates would we have in a progression leading from some mere "light sensitive patch" to something like a human eye?  There would be many, each of which stop Darwinian evolution from progressing in the way that Darwinists imagine. The claim that Darwin did something to explain the origin of vision is one of the many unfounded legends of evolutionary biology. I haven't even yet mentioned that organisms don't see with mere eyes, but see with vision systems (consisting of eyes, many specialized proteins, optic nerves, and very complex brain structures) that are in total many times more complex than an eye. 

                             The intricate structure of recoverin

Origins Baloney in the “Cosmos” TV Series

In 2014 millions of people watched the television series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Since this TV series was heavily promoted by a host of science-related websites, the viewers of the series must have thought they were seeing nothing but solid factual science. But episode 2 of the series (entitled “Some of the Things That Molecules Do”) contained some large errors of fact and logic which we can find by looking at this transcript. 

The episode started out by talking at length about how dogs evolved from wolves. Tyson tells us, “The awesome power of evolution transformed the ravenous wolf into the faithful shepherd who protects the herd and drives the wolf away.” But this was not actually an example of natural evolution, because it was produced by intentional human intervention, presumably after humans took wolf cubs and started raising them as pets. This example of artificial selection (not natural selection) is therefore an odd thing to be citing as something showing “the awesome power of evolution.”

Tyson then states the following:

If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only 10,000 or 15,000 years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.

This statement commits a logic error. It would be logically correct to make a statement like this:

If wind erosion can produce a 1% deformation in something in 10 years, how much of a deformation might wind erosion produce in 500 years? Easily 20% or more.

But by asking us to draw a conclusion about the power of natural selection (something blind) from the power of artificial selection (something guided), Tyson has committed a logic error as bad as in the statement below:

If non-blind painters can produce 100 portrait masterpieces in 200 years, how many portrait masterpieces might blind painters have produced in 500 years? Easily hundreds.

To the contrary of what Tyson claims, there is a very strong reason why we cannot explain any complex biological innovations merely by saying they were the result of natural selection. The reason is that natural selection never occurs in regard to some complex biological innovation until after it has appeared. Once a new biological innovation occurs, it may result in an increased reproduction rate or increased survival rate in the organisms with that biological innovation. But such a thing (a natural selection effect) never occurs in regard to some biological innovation until after that biological innovation appears. So natural selection can never be the cause of a very complex biological innovation. You don't explain something by referring to something that occurred after that thing appeared.

Tyson then makes some claims about DNA. He states the following:

DNA is a molecule shaped like a long twisted ladder or double helix. The rungs of the ladder are made of four different kinds of smaller molecules. These are the letters of the genetic alphabet. Particular arrangements of those letters spell out the instructions for all living things, telling them how to grow, move, digest, sense the environment, heal, reproduce.

This is a very big misstatement. Our DNA does not tell a fertilized ovum how to grow to become a baby, does not tell us how to move, does not tell us how to sense the environment, and does not tell us how to reproduce. It is not even metaphorically correct to make the statement quoted above, because DNA does not contain a human body specification. There is no layout or specification of a human bone structure or human limbs in DNA, nor is there any layout of the human eye or ears, nor is there any layout or specification of the human reproduction system. DNA is neither a blueprint nor a recipe for making a human (see the end of this post for quotes by several scientists clarifying that DNA is no such thing). DNA does not contain any instructions telling a fertilized egg how to progress to become a human baby.

How do we know that DNA has no such things? The first reason is that no such blueprint or recipe has been found in human DNA, even though it has been exhaustively analyzed by major multi-year science projects such as the Human Genome Project and the ENCODE project. The second reason is that the expressive limitations of DNA prevent it from ever expressing such complex information. Tyson refers to “the letters of the genetic alphabet.” The way that this alphabet works is that the only things that can be spelled out in such a language are amino acids. Below we see the genetic code used by DNA. The U, C, A and G in the table are the “four letters of the genetic alphabet” Tyson referred to. But as the table makes clear, the only things that can be spelled out with this genetic alphabet are amino acids (such as proline and valine) that are the ingredients of proteins.

DNA is therefore merely a repository of chemical information. It is not some blueprint or recipe for making a human, and its structural limitations prevent it from being such a thing. Consider a traffic light. A traffic light is an information system capable of presenting only three items of information: the messages “STOP,” “GO,” and “CAUTION.” Just as the physical limitations of a traffic light greatly limit the type of information it can present, the physical limitations of DNA greatly limit the type of information it can present, limiting such information to be only chemical information rather than complex structural biological information. The shapes and structures of complex three-dimensional organs and organ systems cannot possibly be expressed in DNA given the limitations of the genetic code, nor can complex assembly instructions such as would be needed to specify how to create a human body.

A third reason why Tyson cannot be correct in saying that DNA is something that contains “the instructions for all living things, telling them how to grow, move, digest, sense the environment, heal, reproduce” is that if DNA were to contain such information, which would be fantastically complex instructions, there would be nothing in a human womb capable of understanding instructions so complex. A blueprint dumped at a construction site (containing lumber, nails, bricks, mortar, copper wire and pipes) doesn't cause a building to be built. The building is only built because there are agents smart enough to read and understand the blueprint and act on its instructions. But we know of nothing at all in a human womb that would be capable of reading and understanding incredibly complex instructions for making a human if they were in DNA. Wombs don't have brains or minds.

So how is it that humans are able to reproduce? How is that a fertilized ovum is able to progress to become a full-sized baby? That is a gigantic mystery of biological life that we don't understand. The reality that DNA does not specify body plans or a recipe for making an organism is a fact that contradicts and smashes all attempts to explain a progression of earthly life forms merely by citing a progression of genomes, which is exactly the faulty explanation that Tyson relies on.

Tyson next tries to warm us up to the idea that random mutations (random changes in DNA) can produce changes in organisms. He first presents the very unimpressive case of a mutation that might have caused a bear with dark fur to become a bear with white fur, giving a camouflage advantage if the bear lived in a snowy climate. Strangely, the 2014 episode I am discussing was written two years after the New York Times reported “Polar bears...are not descended from brown bears, scientists report.”

But regardless of whether it did occur, a possibility such as the one Tyson has mentioned is not terribly improbable. Such a thing is called microevolution, a small change in an organism that does not involve any complex innovation. Microevolution does indeed sometimes occur.

You can get a rough idea of the likelihood of a favorable random mutation by considering the case of a monkey at a keyboard. If you are an average typist with about a 1% typing error rate, and you bring in a monkey to randomly strike a key on your keyboard, the chance of that random keystroke improving your text is about this 1% figure multiplied by the number of keys on the keyboard. This gives a probability of about 1 in 3000. Similarly, a random mutation in DNA might have something like 1 chance in 3000 of producing some tiny improvement that natural selection might favor.

But what's the chance of getting a new functional protein from random mutations? The chance of this is exponentially smaller. An average protein consists of about 200 amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve a particular functional effect. There are 20 amino acids in the genetic code. A protein with 200 amino acids might have its amino acids arranged in 20 to the 200th power ways (20²⁰⁰ ways), and only a microscopic fraction of these would be functional. Similarly, there are roughly 30 to the 200th power ways in which a typing monkey might type random text (30²⁰⁰ ways), and only a microscopic fraction of these would be meaningful useful instructions.

So while it is not terribly improbable that a typing monkey might produce a keystroke that improves your written text (such a thing having a probability of about 1 in 3000), it is almost infinitely more improbable (more than a trillion quadrillion quintillion times more improbable) that a typing monkey might produce a usable 200-word computer program. And similarly, while it is not all that improbable that a single mutation might produce some small improvement in a genome, it is almost infinitely more improbable (more than a trillion quadrillion quintillion times more improbable) that random mutations might conspire to produce a protein of 200 amino acids arranged in just the right way to produce some novel functional effect. Given a billion typing monkeys across the globe hitting typewriter keys for a billion years, we would not expect any of them to produce a functional 200-word computer program; and given five billion years of random mutations across the globe, we would not expect a functionally useful new protein of 200 amino acids to appear by such chance mutations. The human genome contains genes for about 20,000 such proteins.

In the Cosmos episode, Tyson tells us a story about the appearance of a functional protein. Here is what he says:

In the beginning, life was blind. This is what our world looked like four billion years ago, before there were any eyes to see. Until a few hundred million years passed, and then, one day, there was a microscopic copying error in the DNA of a bacterium. This random mutation gave that microbe a protein molecule that absorbed sunlight.

Of course, this is utter nonsense. A random mutation changes exactly one nucleotide base pair in DNA, and its effect is never greater than changing or adding one particular amino acid in a protein. But proteins are made of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve a functional effect. If a light-absorbing protein molecule had appeared by random mutations, this would have required a fantastically improbable conspiracy of random mutations occurring over millions of years. But Tyson has told us that “one day” such a functional molecule has appeared, because of a single random mutation. This is as crazy as someone saying that a monkey could produce a 200-character functional new computer program by typing a single keystroke (or an intelligible 50-word recipe by typing a single keystroke).

The molecular complexity of proteins was unknown to Darwin, who also knew nothing of the complexity of the cell. Proteins are a great embarrassment to all who would claim that humans are the result of blind forces. Our bodies are built of many thousands of proteins, but scientists have no credible accounts for the origin of any protein, and each is as complex a piece of functionality as a 200-word computer program. A mainstream scientific paper says, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."

Tyson then tells us the following tale:

Here's a flatworm's-eye view of the world. This multi-celled organism evolved a dimple in the pigment spot. The bowl-shaped depression allowed the animal to distinguish light from shadow to crudely make out objects in its vicinity, including those to eat and those that might eat it a tremendous advantage. Later, things became a little clearer. The dimple deepened and evolved into a socket with a small opening. Over thousands of generations, natural selection was slowly sculpting the eye.

Tyson is using here a standard strategy for those trying to suggest that vision systems could have appeared accidentally: start out by mentioning the tiniest visual structure you can imagine, and hope that people regard this as something very simple that could have easily appeared accidentally. But if you were to delve into all the microscopic details and biochemistry details, you would find that this tiny thing is actually extremely complex. Cells are very tiny, but they have functional complexity so great they have been compared to small cities. There are 1000-page books devoted to nothing but describing the complexity of cells. And the flatworm organ Tyson refers us to is much more complicated than a cell.

Flatworms have primitive light-sensing structures called ocelli. In the quote above Tyson implies that first we had the fairly primitive ocelli of the flatworm, and then much later we had the first real eyes. This does not match what the fossil record tells us. Animals with the primitive ocelli of the flatworm do not appear earlier in the fossil record than animals with complex eyes. Both the flatworms and many types of animals with eyes are believed to have first appeared at the time of the Cambrian Explosion in which most of the animal phyla rather suddenly appeared, contrary to what we would expect from Darwinian gradualism. There is no fossil record of any primitive eyes that appeared before the first complex eyes in the fossil record, and which are believed to be the predecessors of species with complex eyes.

The visual above (from this mainstream science web site) shows the situation. The flatworms are the Platyhelminthes. Fish with eyes appeared in the phylum Chordata, the same phylum of humans. There is no evidence of fish descending from flatworms, and no evidence that the first animals with good eyes descended from flatworms (contrary to what Tyson has insinuated).

A very important misstatement by Tyson is his claim that the crude visual organ of the flatworm had the ability to “distinguish light from shadow to crudely make out objects in its vicinity, including those to eat and those that might eat it.” This amounts to a claim that flatworms have vision. But they have no such thing. They merely have a light-sensitive patch sufficient only to tell lightness from darkness. The primitive “eyes” of a flatworm (its ocelli) are not sufficient for it to “crudely make out objects in its vicinity.” And the tiny “brain” of a flatworm (with only a very small number of neurons) is way too small for vision. A scientific paper says this of the flatworm's-eye: “There is no image-forming apparatus, and the eye is probably used merely as a detector of light with directional sensitivity.”

What difference does it make whether a light-sensitive patch of an organism is sufficient to provide a crude, blurry form of vision, rather than merely telling an animal which direction is up and down? It makes a very great difference to the question of whether we can reasonably imagine a gradual evolution of an eye from a primitive light-sensitive patch. If a light-sensitive patch and the tiniest brain (like a flatworm has) is sufficient to produce crude vision, then we can imagine that each additional change leading up to an eye producing clear vision was a change producing a benefit to the organism that had such a change. If, on the other hand, a light-sensitive patch and the tiniest brain is not sufficient to produce vision, then we have to imagine many additional changes in the eye region and brain occurring without producing any reward, until finally after many required changes there occurred the late reward of functional vision. The latter scenario is one that is not credible under Darwinian assumptions.

There is no reason why natural selection would make a whole bunch of changes to produce a vision system unless there was a continual reward for each change in such a series of changes. But it very frequently happens (inside of biology and outside of it) that there is no continually rewarded path leading to a new complex innovation, and no reward comes until many changes are made, and many parts are arranged in just the right way. Such “late reward” scenarios are far more common than “continual reward” scenarios, a fact that constantly stymies and short-circuits explanations of the type Tyson is trying to make here. On the protein level, the origin of every functional protein is a “late reward” scenario (halves of a protein molecule being non-functional), so in the human genome with genes for some 20,000 proteins, we have some 20,000 “late reward” scenarios that all defy attempts to explain them by imagining some continually rewarded Darwinian path.

What Tyson has done is to paint a speculative picture of continually rewarded evolution from a primitive light-sensitive patch (supposedly producing crude vision) to an eye. The scenario is not supported by the fossil record, and is not credible because light-sensitive patches on organisms like flatworms do not at all produce crude vision. And when we delve down to the protein level, we find that even this supposedly primitive light-sensitive patch would require a very high state of functional amino acid organization most unlikely to ever appear by chance.

Based on these numerous misstatements and misleading impressions, Tyson claims, “The complexity of the human eye poses no challenge to evolution by natural selection.” To the contrary, there is no complex biological innovation that can plausibly be explained by natural selection, which never occurs in regard to a biological innovation until after that innovation occurs. Tyson has reached his reassuring “we got this” conclusion by engaging in various cheats large and small, including the gigantic whopper of claiming that a light sensitive protein might originate on a single day, the crucial misstatement suggesting DNA is a recipe for making an organism, the unfounded suggestion that the first advanced eyes evolved from primitive eyes (which the fossil record does not support), and the erroneous idea that mere light-sensitive patches like those in flatworms produce a crude form of vision. Once we realize that genotypes do not specify phenotypes (merely influencing them), and that DNA does not and cannot store body plans, the legs are pulled from out of the Darwinist explanation for complex biological innovations such as eyes. Since DNA does not actually store the extremely complex structural arrangement of a vision system, there is no way that vision systems could have appeared through any imaginable modification of DNA, whether it be random mutations or anything else.

Near the end of the Cosmos episode, Tyson claims that scientists are “not afraid to admit what we don't know.” To the contrary, many of them seem to not at all know what they do not know, and to think that they know very much more than they do know. The typical modern scientist claims that he understands the origin of complex visible biological innovations, but admits that he does not understand the origin of life itself or the mysteries of morphogenesis and embryonic development. It makes no sense to claim that you understand the first of these things without understanding the last two of these things, since there is every reason to suspect that all three are produced by similar causal factors. Man's knowledge of nature is fragmentary, and the mere fragments we have (like ten or twenty pieces of a 400-piece jigsaw puzzle) are not sufficient to allow us to answer biological origins mysteries that may take mankind a thousand years to unravel. It's no sin for a scientist to act like some “Wheel of Fortune” very-early-guesser who guesses the answer after only three or four of the 30 letters have been turned; but such guesses should not be passed off as established truth.

Tyson is one of many scientists who feed us similar origins baloney. Very recently the Science Daily web site (using a Stanford University press release) had a news article entitled, “Why deep oceans gave life to the first big, complex organisms.” The article dealt with the great mystery of why most of the known animal phyla suddenly appeared in the Cambrian Explosion, in a vast explosion of organization and functional information that included the first animals with vision systems. We are told in the last paragraph of the article that the explanation offered by an assistant professor Sperling is simply that the temperature at the bottom of the ocean was right for this. Sperling says, “The only place where temperatures were consistent was in the deep ocean. That's why animals appeared there.” This is reasoning on the same inane level as trying to explain the appearance of ten extraterrestrial monsters in your local swimming pool on Labor Day by saying that the reason the ten monsters suddenly appeared was that the water wasn't too hot or cold on Labor Day.