Scientific Quotations on Darwin's Theory of Evolution

Scientific Quotations

on Darwin's Theory of Evolution

As far as I know, the quotations below originate in the pro-evolution camp, except for the very few labeled "Creationist". . .

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them . . . "

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)

Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum

Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places. "

Francis Hitching

The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong

Penguin Books, 1982, p. 19

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. "

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and

Paleontology, Harvard University

"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"

Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127

". . . Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils . . . I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. "

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,

British Museum of Natural History, London

As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland

Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems

4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89

"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history and has been conservative in habitat. "

G. S. Carter, Professor & author

Fellow of Corpus Christi College

Cambridge, England

Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution

University of Washington Press, 1967

"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. 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 . . . 2. Sudden Appearance. 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, Prof of Geology and

Paleontology, Harvard University

Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977

"But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" (p. 206)

"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 gravest objection which can be urged against my theory (of evolution). " (p. 292)

Charles Darwin

The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint

Avenel Books, 1979

"Darwin. . . was embarrassed by the fossil record. . . we are now about 120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, . . . some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information. "

David M. Raup, Curator of Geology

Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago

"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"

Field Museum of Natural History

Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25

"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us? . . . The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. "

Luther D. Sunderland, Creationist

Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,

4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9

"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. . . . The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled. "

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson

Lund University, Sweden

Famous botanist and evolutionist

As quoted in: The Earth Before Man, p. 51

"The family trees which adorn our text books are based on inference, however, reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. "

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and

Paleontology, Harvard University

"Evolution's Erratic Pace"

Natural History, May, 1977, p. 13

". . . if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record. "

Lord Solly Zuckerman, MA, MD, DSc (Anatomy)

Prof. of anatomy, University of Birmingham

Chief scientific advisor, United Kingdom

Beyond the Ivory Tower

Taplinger Publishing Company, 1970, p 64

"The entire hominid (a so-called 'ape-man' fossil) collection know today would barely cover a billiard table. . . Ever since Darwin. . . preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man. "

John Reader

"Whatever Happened to Zinjanthropus?

New Scientist, March 26, 1981, pp. 802-805

"The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin. "

"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans -- of upright, naked, tool-making, big-brained beings -- is, to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter. "

Dr. Lyall Watson

"The Water People"

Science Digest, May 1982, p 44.

"The fossil record pertaining to man is still so sparsely known that those who insist on positive declarations can do nothing more than jump from one hazardous surmise to another and hope that the next dramatic discovery does not make them utter fools. . . As we have seen, there are numerous scientists and popularizers today who have the temerity to tell us that there is 'no doubt' how man originated. If only they had the evidence. . . "

William R. Fix

The Bone Peddlers (Macmillan, 1984), pp. 150

"A five million year old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib. . . The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone. "

Dr. Tim White

Evolutionary anthropologist

University of California at Berkeley

New Scientist, April 28, 1983, p. 199

". . . not being a paleontologist, I don't want to pour too much scorn on paleontologists, but if you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a very strong desire to exaggerate the importance of those fragments. . . "

Greg Kerby

From an address to the Biology Teachers

Association of South Australia, 1976

"Echoing the criticism made of his father's Homo habilis skulls, he (Richard Leakey) added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was 'imagination, made of plaster of paris,' thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to. "

Richard Leakey (Son of Louis Leakey)

Director of National Museums of Kenya, Africa

The Weekend Australian, May 7-8, 1983, p. 3

"The evidence given above makes it overwhelmingly likely that Lucy was no more than a variety of pygmy chimpanzee, and walked the same way (awkwardly upright on occasions, but mostly quadrupedal). The 'evidence' for the alleged transformation from ape to man is extremely unconvincing. "

Albert W. Mehlert, Creationist and Former

Evolutionist & paleoanthropology researcher

"Lucy - Evolution's Solitary Claim for Ape/Man"

Creation Research Society Quarterly,

Vol 22, No. 3, (Dec 1985), p. 145

"In recent years several authors have written popular books on human origins which are based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and objectivity. . . by and large, written by authors with a formal academic background. . . Prominent among them were On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris. . . " (p. 283)

"Yet the tendency for individual paleontologists to trace human history directly back to their own fossil finds has persisted to the present day. " (p. 285)

"So one is forced to conclude that there is no clear cut scientific picture of human evolution. " (p. 285)

Dr. R. Martin, Senior Research Fellow

Zoological Society of London

"Man is Not an Onion"

New Scientist, Aug 4, 1977

"The paleontologists have convinced me small changes do not accumulate. "

Francisco Ayala, Ph. d

Assoc Professor of Genetics, U of California

"Evolutionary theory under fire"

Science, Nov 21, 1980. p 883-887

"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless. "

Prof. Louis Bounoure, Former:

President Biological Society of Strassbourg,

Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum,

Director of Research at the

French National Centre of Scientific Research

The Advocate, March 8, 1984, p. 17

"We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists. "

Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and Physicist

Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University

Former math instructor at MIT

Teilhardism and the New Religion:

A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of de Chardin

Tan Books & Publishers, 1988, pp. 1-2

"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever. In explaining evolution we do not have one iota of fact. "

Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, Physiologist

Atomic Energy Commission. As quoted in:

Evolution and the Emperor's New Clothes,

3D Enterprises Limited, 1983, title page

"One is forced to conclude that many scientists and technologists pay lip-service to Darwinian theory only because it supposedly excludes a Creator. . . "

Dr. Michael Walker

Senior Lecturer, Anthropology, Sydney University

Quadrant, Oct 1982, p. 44

". . . every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended thereafter) is imaginary as it is not supported by the scientifically established facts of microbiology, fossils, and mathematical probability concepts. Darwin was wrong. " (p. 209)

". . . The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science. " (p. 210)

I. L. Cohen, Mathematician, Researcher, Author,

Member New York Academy of Sciences

Officer of the Archaeological Institute of America

Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities

"Nine-tenths of the talk on Evolution is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views. In all this great museum, there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species".

Dr Etheridge, paleontologist of the British museum.

"If pressed about man's ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and probably older. If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving".

Richard Leakey, world's foremost paleoanthropologist,

in a PBS documentary, 1990