User talk:Paper45tee/Notable Charles Darwin misquotes

Charles Darwin's works is often misrepresented by intelligent design supporters and creationists.

The Origin of Species
Scott Huse in The Collapse of Evolution (1996) claimed Darwin wrote:

According to Richard Dawkins, this quote is taken out of context  because Darwin explains the development of the eye in that "some simple animals have only "aggregates of pigment-cells...without any nerves ... [which] serve only to distinguish light from darkness." The full quote, in context, reads:

The Descent of Man
In Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, to support of the claim that the theory of evolution inspired Nazism, Ben Stein attributes the following statement to Charles Darwin's book The Descent of Man:

Stein stops there, then names Darwin as the author in a way that suggests that Darwin provided a rationale for the activities of the Nazis. However, the original source shows that Stein has significantly changed the text and meaning of the paragraph, by leaving out whole and partial sentences without indicating that he had done so. The original paragraph (page 168) (words that Stein omitted shown in bold) and the very next sentences in the book state:

The Expelled Exposed website also points out that the same misleading selective quotation from this passage was used by anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan in the 1925 Scopes Trial, but the full passage makes it clear that Darwin was not advocating eugenics. The eugenics movement relied on simplistic and faulty assumptions about heredity, and by the 1920s evolutionary biologists were criticizing eugenics. Clarence Darrow, who defended the teaching of human evolution in the Scopes trial, wrote a scathing repudiation of eugenics.

In Richard Weikart's 2004 book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany he claims:

According to talk.origins this is a common creationist quote mine. When Darwin referred to "race" he meant "varieties," not human races. In the passage "there is nothing in Darwin's words to support (and much in his life to contradict) any claim that Darwin wanted the "lower" or "savage races" to be exterminated. He was merely noting what appeared to him to be factual, based in no small part on the evidence of a European binge of imperialism and colonial conquest during his lifetime." Darwin's passage, in full context, reads: