Quotes About The Fossil Record

“In 1867, George Campbell, Duke of Argyll, had published The Reign of Law, a book that Darwin found deeply annoying. A supporter of Richard Owen, Campbell argued that while evolution (or "Development") might be observable in the fossil record, it was merely evidence of God's purpose. God, for example, would cause horses and oxen to evolve in time to meet human needs. The brightly colored plumage of birds, Campbell went on, were simply God's decorations of nature for humanity's enjoyment.”

— Jonathan Clements

“An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal.”

— Richard E. Leakey

“But I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.”

— E.J.H. Corner

“The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.”

— Gareth J. Nelson

“The phrase 'the fossil record' sounds impressive and authoritative. As used by some persons it becomes, as intended, intimidating, taking on the aura of esoteric truth as expounded by an elite class of specialists. But what is it, really, this fossil record? Only data in search of interpretation. All claims to the contrary that I know, and I know of several, are so much superstition.”

— Gareth J. Nelson

“I published that theory [of speciational evolution] in a 1954 paper ... and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others ... I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local population that changed very rapidly in the fossil record ... Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time.”

— Ernst W. Mayr

“Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story.”

— Michael Martone

“In a completely different era and domain, Charles Darwin hypothesized that the emergence of each new species was a gradual process, taking place through the slow transformation of existing species into their somewhat-modified offspring. Yet evidence for such continuous change was not only lacking back then but is scarce even today, having prompted Darwin to label it "the gravest objection [that] can be urged against my theory." Instead, over millions of years species in the fossil record show little or no evolutionary change. New species tend to appear over periods spanning tens of thousands of years, a split second in terms of all evolutionary time. Evolution proceeds in bursts, which are in turn preserved in the fossil record.”

— Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

“The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)”

— Carl Sagan

“The boy who was taken," she said. "Is he your son?"
"How old do you think I am, Dweller?"
"I'm a little shaky on the fossil record, but I'd say fifty to sixty thousand years."
"Eighteen. And no. He's not my son.”

— Veronica Rossi

“As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this, of course, is why evolution remains controversial.”

— Kenneth R. Miller

“What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.”

— Louise Leakey

“The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast-above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill-has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.”

— David Quammen

“Protectionist politicians cannot stand the notion of a fossil-fuel-rich America maintaining record levels of production through exports.”

— Mike Pompeo

“The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.”

— Jack Horner

“Every single record I have is a fossil.”

— Henry Rollins

“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.”

— Peter Singer

“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.”

— David Berlinski

“Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you? In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts.”

— Jeanette Winterson

“The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water - either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in your rock - your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright.”

— Jeanette Winterson

“A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks semipopular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general. these have not been found-yet the optimism has died hard and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.”

— David M. Raup

“There are about 250,000 different species of fossil plants and animals known . In spite of this large quantity of information, it is but a tiny fraction of the diversity that [according to the theory] actually lived in the past. There are well over a million species living today and . [it is] possible to predict how many species ought to be in our fossil record. That number is at least 100 times the number we have found.”

— David M. Raup

“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.”

— David Pilbeam

“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.”

— Lynn Margulis

“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.”

— Ernst Mayr

“The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms.”

— Robert Jastrow

“Sometime in the first billion years, life appeared on the earth's surface. Slowly, the fossil record indicates, living organisms climbed the ladder from simple to more advanced forms.”

— Robert Jastrow

“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.”

— Francis Collins

“It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts.”

— Mark Ruffalo

“On a perfect planet such as might be acceptable to a physicist, one might predict that from its origin the diversity of life would grow exponentially until the carrying capacity, however defined, was reached. The fossil record on Earth, however, tells a very different story.”

— Simon Conway Morris

“Fossils work almost the same way as photography as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.”

— Hiroshi Sugimoto

“The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution i.e., a species becoming a new species accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.”

— Steven M. Stanley

“Established species are evolving so slowly that major transitions between genera and higher taxa must be occurring within small rapidly evolving populations that leave NO LEGIBLE FOSSIL RECORD.”

— Steven M. Stanley

“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

“The record-breaking extreme weather events causing chaos across the globe should be a wake-up call. The transition to a low-carbon economy will be much more painful if we wait until there is a climate crisis before recognising that more than half of the world's fossil fuel reserves will have to remain in the ground.”

— Christiana Figueres

“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.”

— D. V. Ager

“Palaeontologists cannot live by uniformitarianism alone. This may be termed the Phenomenon of the Fallibility of the Fossil Record.”

— D. V. Ager

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

“Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

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

— 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.”

— 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 ...”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“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 ?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.”

— Francis Crick

“The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed.”

— John Desmond Bernal

“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”

— Richard Dawkins

“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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut