One of the most common and dishonest quote mines by creationist cult organisations is in relation to Charles Darwin and the evolution of the eye. Darwin is quoted as saying,
"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."
Creationist cult leaders and their indoctrinated followers point to this as an admission from Darwin that the eye could not have evolved. There could be nothing further from the truth.
The immediately following paragraph from Darwin is suspiciously excluded.
"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."
Darwin then spends a number of pages describing a sequence of intermediate stages which we already have examples of in nature.
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