The Weak Theory of Evolution

The Weak Theory of Evolution

One of the most contested issues in the creation/evolution debate is the

origin of the eye. Creationists see the eye as the pinnacle of complex

design; evolutionists see the eye as the accumulation of small mutations

preserved by natural selection. Charles Darwin started the controversy

with an argument that is widely quoted by both sides:

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.[1]

Not surprisingly, cre...

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...empt to impute the difficulty of imagining evolutionary pathways to the critic. The only difference is that Dawkins' version is more aggressively ad hominem. However, the fault does not lie in the critic but in the Continuum Argument. It is not the critic's job to imagine evolutionary pathways; it is the believer's job to demonstrate them without resorting to just-so stories. The philosopher David Hume once argued that we can imagine rabbits coming into existence out of nowhere, and he concluded from this that there is nothing contradictory in the notion that something can come from nothing. Now we certainly can form a mental image of rabbits coming from nowhere, as we can for the transformation of a lensless eye to a lensed eye or a steam engine to a warp engine, but we are not obliged to accept a necessary connection between our mental images and external reality.