Replies

It is the responsibility of the person making the claim that the quotation was said to document the evidence for that quotation.

And I neither made that claim nor doubted it, so it makes no sense whatsoever to me that I should be held to account for it.

You've certainly spent a heck of a lot of time supporting it.

It is the responsibility of the person making the claim that the quotation was said to document the evidence for that quotation.

Hello Alamo-Girl! For goodness sake this is getting tiresome. I have already explained that the offending quote was not a direct quote from Darwin, but my translation of the Latin omne vivum ex vivo -- which being "my" translation (and probably not a very good one at that; I expected cornelis would have stepped in!!!), I put it in quotation marks.

I'd only add that the phrase omne vivum ex vivo is perfectly consistent with Darwin's position, as is evident to me from his published works, and also evident to Hubert Yockey: It was he who used the phrase omne vivum ex vivo in his Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (2005) to describe Darwin's position.

Darwin's position evididently is that the origin of life is either unknowable or undecideable. That is also Bohr's position, and Yockey's. The theory of evolution does not need an origin of life to be a theory of the evolution of life.

I'm in agreement with VadeRetro's observation that if Darwin had put a whole lot of stock to the "warm little pond" scenario, he would have put it in his published work. If a person wants to share a speculation with a friend in a private letter in 1878, he's certainly entitled. It would have had to be more than a whimsical speculation for a careful scholar/scientist like Darwin to make it public. Which he did not do. BTW, that's exactly the same way that Yockey sees it.

FWIW.

Thanks so much for the ping, Alamo-Girl!