Paleontology Quotes
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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.
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Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past. Paleontology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it does about how humans came about, but that is heresy.
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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
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Are the different species defined by paleontologists - Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and ourselves, Homo sapiens - all part of the same gene pool or not?
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In vertebrate paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss of clarity.
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Human paleontology shares a peculiar trait with such disparate subjects as theology and extraterrestrial biology: it contains more practitioners than objects for study.
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Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.
