MANCHURIAN CANDIDATES ARE BRED, NOT BORNRN

[Ed. Conrad]

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On Saturday, May 11, 1996, Ed Conrad wrote to talk.origins
to respond to Michael Clark's accusation that he had used only
a portion of Charles Darwin's quote in which he expressed
serious doubts that evolution could have been responsible
for the eye:
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HERE'S WHAT I SAID THAT CHARLES DARWIN SAID . . .
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"To suppose that the eye (with so many parts
working together) . . . could have been formed
by natural selection seems, I freely confess,
absurd in the highest degree."
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THIS WAS CHARLIE'S 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
bar code should become aggregated and developed into nerves,
endowed with this special sensibility."
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< -- Charles Darwin, 1859 -- ORIGIN OF SPECIES
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I thought I said what Darwin had said but David Iain Greig said
what I said wasn't what Darwin said because he said Darwin
said something more than what I said he said, then Steve Vickers
of the UK sends a nasty e-mail and said HE knows what Darwin
said, which is not entirely what I said he said, so I said to myself,
"I'll say what he said Darwin said even though I don't know if
Charlie really said it, since this is what he said he had said.
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Please excuse the following rude interruption . . .
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< Nice little song and dance, there, Zippy.
< Can you balance a ball on your nose?
< -- Michael Clark ( a true Darwinian)
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Actually, Michael, it doesn't really matter what Darwin said
or what these fellas said he said -- or what they said I didn't
say -- since what I said, whether Darwin said it or not, isn't
something that needed to be said. So I'm sort of saying
Charlie had painted himself into a corner and said what he
thought he'd better say, else critics would say he really had
nothing to say, even though he undoubtedly had said it.
< -- Ed Conrad
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MAN AS OLD AS COAL
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http://groups.google.com/group/alt.genealogy/browse_thread/thread/1409ed3b4f7a7647
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http://www.edconrad.com