h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7358868.stm

I've moved along to 'The Descent of Man' and this bit, among a thousand others, has caught my eye:

'Helmholtz, the highest authority in Europe on the subject, has said
about the human eye; that if an optician had sold him an instrument so
carelessly made, he would have thought himself fully justified in
returning it.' Chapter XIV

It's a wonderful (and pithy) complement to the bit in the 'Origin':

'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. 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.'

The ending is awe-inspiring:

"There is grandeur in this view of
life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the
Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a
beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and
are being evolved."

It seems almost churlish to quibble about his mention of a creator - but then he didn't know about the Miller-Urey experiment.

Just finishing up another:

'Many of the views which have been advanced are highly speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous; but I have in every case given the reasons which have led me to one view rather than to another. It seemed worth while to try how far the principle of evolution would throw light on some of the more complex problems in the natural history of man. False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.'


The Descent of Man, chapter XXI

It is quite obvious, and at times painfully so, that Darwin is, particularly in the Descent of Man, a product of his time, both in his attitudes to the female of the species and to people of other lands. It is also quite obvious that he would have benefited greatly in his theorizing by a familiarity with the work of Mendel. He is absolutely correct, however, in this passage:

'The main conclusion here arrived at, and now held by many
naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment is that
man is descended from some less highly organised form. The grounds
upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close
similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development,
as well as in innumerable points of structure and constitution, both
of high and of the most trifling importance,- the rudiments which he
retains, and the abnormal reversions to which he is occasionally
liable,- are facts which cannot be disputed. They have long been
known, but until recently they told us nothing with respect to the
origin of man. Now when viewed by the light of our knowledge of the
whole organic world, their meaning is unmistakable. The great
principle of evolution stands up clear and firm, when these groups
or facts are considered in connection with others, such as the
mutual affinities of the members of the same group, their geographical
distribution in past and present times, and their geological
succession. It is incredible that all these facts should speak
falsely. 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.'

Chapter XXI again.

how much more clear it is today.

Perhaps I should just post the whole of chapter XXI.


I find this particularly inspiring, especially coming from a Victorian English Country Gentleman:

'By considering the embryological structure of man,- the homologies
which he presents with the lower animals,- the rudiments which he
retains,- and the reversions to which he is liable, we can partly
recall in imagination the former condition of our early progenitors;
and can approximately place them in their proper place in the
zoological series. We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy,
tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant
of the Old World. This creature, if its whole structure had been
examined by a naturalist, would have been classed amongst the
Quadrumana, as surely as the still more ancient progenitor of the
Old and New World monkeys. The Quadrumana and all the higher mammals
are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal, and this
through a long series of diversified forms, from some amphibian-like
creature, and this again from some fish-like animal. In the dim
obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all
the Vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal provided with
branchiae, with the two sexes united in the same individual, and
with the most important organs of the body (such as the brain and
heart) imperfectly or not at all developed. This animal seems to
have been more like the larvae of the existing marine ascidians than
any other known form.'

Exquisite!