Excerpt from Problems of Organic Adaptation: A Course of Three Lectures Delivered at the Rice Institute, March 8, 9, and 10, 1921
Again, adaptations are relative but not absolute adjust ments. Even the most perfect adaptation is not absolutely perfect. For example, that marvel of adaptation, the human eye, is very far from being a perfect optical instrument; Helmholtz is reported to have said that if an optician should send him an optical instrument as imperfect as the human eye, he would send it back to him and tell him to learn his business; and yet there IS probably no more perfect adaptation in nature than this. Furthermore, all grada tions of adjustment occur among different organisms from the relatively imperfect to the most perfect, and these gradations indicate that fitness in the living world is rela tive and not absolute, and they indicate that adaptations are a product of natural evolution rather than of super natur'al creation.
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