Best evolution & records Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

Form Secret Records Tree Evolution Evidence Trade Extremes Data Branches Reasonable Persist Fossils Textbooks Inference Rarity Paleontology Creation Science Creation And Evolution

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“[T]ruly grand and powerful theories [...] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. [...] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly.”

Ifs Stills Father Powerful Records Havens Information Particular Brother Theory Source Evolution Dad Claims Independent Structure Errors Locals Observation Bankruptcy Unified Inference

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution”

Needs Use Cases Records Evolution Evidence Gaps Fossils Paradoxical

Book:The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.”

Ifs Common Study Doubt Records Evolution Evidence Proof Strongest Ancestor Dna Fossils Living Things Descent Lingering Dna Evidence

Author:Francis Collins

“The best bands kept making records and had this evolution, where by the end, by their commercial phase or sellout phase, the records are from outer space.”

Ends Space Records Evolution Band Phases Outer Space

Author:Ariel Rechtshaid

“In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudices, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record.”

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”

Form Secret Records Evolution Trade Extremes Persist Fossils Rarity Paleontology Creation Science Creation And Evolution Gradualism

Author:Soren Kierkegaard

“My record, Evolution, is really about me evolving as an artist and trying a few new things. There's a song called, Road Worn, which is about spending so much time on the road and is a lot more jazzy sounding than most of my other music.”

Trying Artist Song Records Evolution Spending Evolve New Things Worn

Author:Eliot Lewis

“I think it's stripped down as far as electronics go, but we just wanted to write a record that we felt better represented how we sound live with more of a rock feel, which is the direction we've been heading. It's just an evolution of the band throughout the years. We worked on this record longer than any other record, so I don't know if "stripped down" is how I would put it; I think it is a little bit more raw sounding.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Feels Writing Years Littles Wanted Felt Bits Sound Records Rocks Evolution Band Little Bit Headings Electronics

Author:Jason C. Miller

“They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.”

Knows Way Looks Shows Body Natural Answers Records Happened Design Evolution Machines Scientist Miracle Your Body Pretending Selection Fossils Natural Selection

Author:Kurt Vonnegut

“There is a relative order to the fossilized species of plants found in the geologic record for which Flood Geology cannot account, unless you can imagine apple and orange trees with Nike sneakers on their roots, racing past the magnolias and primitive mammals, leaving the ginkgoes back there with the dinosaurs when the Flood waters began to rise.”

“The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all.”

Needs Years Humans Shows Courses Belief Understanding Human Beings Animal Existence Millions Records Evolution Contrary Fossils Primates

Author:Peter Singer

“But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”

Source: On the Origin of the Species and The Voyage of the Beagle

“Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.”

Records Theory Evolution Aids Fossils Embarrassment

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design or stupidity, I do not know-as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

Source: Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History

“The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range.”

Ifs Should Looks Happens Records Groups Events Evolution Range Isolated Fossils Rapids Speciation

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.”

Should Doe Facts Process Records Modern Theory Evolution Operations Rejects Yield Fossils Darwinism Theory Of Evolution Gradualism Gradual Change

Book:The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

“The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records, finds no examples of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty-"the kingdom"-not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form man.”

Source: The Testimony of the Rocks: Or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed

“I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind?”

“Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual findings of paleontology. Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record.”

Source: One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought

“Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.”

Source: Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution

“It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual completely continuous transitional sequences.”

Knows Levels Known Records Evolution Remains Species Categories Fossils Sequence Stasis

Author:George Gaylord Simpson

“These are the experiences I wish to record in this book, which should really be called The Diary of a Palaeontologist. But in committing them to paper I found it advisable to alter and add a good deal, to enable the reader without specialized training to follow me along the winding paths of palaeontology and prehistory.”

Should Book Found Wish Deals Path Records Evolution Reader Paper Training Add Diaries Follow Me Advisable Prehistory

Author:Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald

“I shall discuss the broad patterns of hominoid evolution, an exercise made enjoyable by the need to integrate diverse kinds of information, and use that as a vehicle to speculate about hominoid origins, an event for which there is no recognized fossil record. Hence, an opportunity to exercise some imagination.”

Needs Kind Made Use Opportunity Imagination Records Events Information Evolution Exercise Patterns Broads Vehicle Diverse Fossils Enjoyable Integrating

Author:David Pilbeam

“There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that this is so. It is simply a fact, Darwin's theory and the fossil record are in conflict.”

Should Facts Form Records Theory Evolution Conflict Deny Gaps Fossils Graveyard

Author:David Berlinski

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