Niles Eldredge Quotes

Enjoy the top 8 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Niles Eldredge.

“Paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a prominent evolutionist, said: The doubt that has infiltrated the previous, smugly confident certitude of evolutionary biologys last twenty years has inflamed passions. He spoke of the lack of total agreement even within the warring camps, and added, things really are in an uproar these days ... Sometimes it seems as though there are as many variations on each [evolutionary] theme as there are individual biologists.”
— Niles Eldredge —

“I'm doing now with cornets exactly what I used to do with trilobites: measuring, analyzing and cataloging the myriad gradations of their forms.”

— Niles Eldredge

“Paleontologists ever since Darwin have been searching (largely in vain) for the sequences of insensibly graded series of fossils that would stand as examples of the sort of wholesale transformation of species that Darwin envisioned as the natural product of the evolutionary process. Few saw any reason to demur - though it is a startling fact that ... most species remain recognizably themselves, virtually unchanged throughout their occurrence in geological sediments of various ages.”

— Niles Eldredge

“The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.”

— Niles Eldredge

“And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ... We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not.”

— Niles Eldredge

“Paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a prominent evolutionist, said: 'The doubt that has infiltrated the previous, smugly confident certitude of evolutionary biology's last twenty years has inflamed passions.' He spoke of the 'lack of total agreement even within the warring camps,' and added, 'things really are in an uproar these days ... Sometimes it seems as though there are as many variations on each [evolutionary] theme as there are individual biologists.'”

— Niles Eldredge

“Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”

— Niles Eldredge