Famous quotes with Fossil record

• I've been looking into the issue for more than thirty years, and I have never seen a hint of genuine evidence of species-to-species transitional forms in the fossil record. The theory stands or falls on the supposed links between species. Even if you came up with what you believe is evidence, time would prove it to be another hoax, as it has so often in the past.

  Ray Comfort
• [Comfort's indtroduction] says very little about “The Origin of Species” per se, limiting itself to familiar creationist canards about the complexity of the human eye and the absence of “transitional forms” from the fossil record. (It’s hard to lend much credence to the scientific arguments of a guy who thinks chimpanzees are monkeys.) There’s a brief biographical section on Darwin’s life, most of which has been plagiarized from a short text by Dr. Stan Guffey, as some bloggers have demonstrated. The rest has been plagiarized from Brian Regal’s introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition of “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,” except for a timeline, which was plagiarized from an online resource. Nearly half of the introduction isn’t even about evolution at all, and consists of a hodgepodge of strained sky-diving metaphors and horror stories about pedophiliac killers. Lastly, although Comfort claimed in advance that “not one jot or tittle” of the text of “The Origin of Species” would be missing from his edition, four entire chapters were omitted. Comfort said that this was an error limited to the first printing, but his critics have claimed that these sections were intentionally left out because they contain strong evidence for Darwin’s theory.

  Ray Comfort
• I want to argue that the “sudden” appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper prediction of evolutionary theory as we understand it. […] Evolutionary “sequences” are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top.

  Stephen Jay Gould
• The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.”

  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.

  Stephen Jay Gould

Related words & questions

Related words: paleontologists, fossils, dinosaur fossil, fossils list, fossil identification, fossil terms, what is a fossil, dinosaur fossils for sale

Related questions:

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parroquet

Synonyms:

parakeet, paraquet, paroquet, parrakeet, parroket, parrot, parrot, parakeet, paraquet, paroquet.