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Mivart is most often quoted for this brilliant statement: Natural selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures. In the second chapter of his book, Mivart considers the flatfish which has the peculiar habit of lying on its side on the ocean floor. It has eyes in the normal position when it hatches just as in all the other fish, but then there is a remarkable metamophosis. Over the course of the next several days the fish begins to become oriented horizontally rather than vertically, the mouth begins to twist, and one of the eyes migrates to the opposite side of the head. The point Mivart makes is that could not have happened by the natural selection of minute modifications. |
| And from
the same chapter: Let us consider the mammary gland, or breast. Is it conceivable that the young of any animal was ever saved from destruction by accidentally sucking a drop of scarcely nutritious fluid from an accidentally hypertrophied cutaneous gland of its mother?” (p 60) |