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More from Maxwell
:: It still reads to me as making no explicit claim, one way or another, as to biological evolution. If anything, it's implicitely contrasting molecules, which don't have descent-with-modification and thus can't have a theory of evolution, with things which do have "continuous change", "growth and decay" and "generation or destruction", and thus might have theories of evolution. Without anything more explicit, I'd be disinclined to come to any conclusion firm enough to include in the article, but it sure sounds to me like he's at least open to the possibility of biological evolution. --[[User:Jtl|Jtl]] 13:34, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
:: It still reads to me as making no explicit claim, one way or another, as to biological evolution. If anything, it's implicitely contrasting molecules, which don't have descent-with-modification and thus can't have a theory of evolution, with things which do have "continuous change", "growth and decay" and "generation or destruction", and thus might have theories of evolution. Without anything more explicit, I'd be disinclined to come to any conclusion firm enough to include in the article, but it sure sounds to me like he's at least open to the possibility of biological evolution. --[[User:Jtl|Jtl]] 13:34, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
== More from Maxwell ==
On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent. Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which Science must stop,—not that Science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But in tracing back the history of matter, Science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and, on the other, that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural. Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limits of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created. (Page 176)