Commenter Seqenenre writes:
Me, my mother, her mother, her mother etc 110 million times. Each and every mother and daughter are of the same species. Yet number 50 million and 49.999.999 certainly are not human. I find this puzzling.
We can deduce two things from this comment. First, Seqenenre is not a native English speaker. I deduce this from the fact that he uses a period instead of a comma as a digit group separator. It is neither here nor there, but I am guessing German.
The second thing I deduce is that Seqenenre has drunk deeply from the well of Darwinist gradualism. Yet there is simply no evidence that gradualism in the way Darwin expected ever happened. Indeed, the rocks suggest it never did. Even Darwin admitted this in Origin and said it was the gravest objection to his theory:
But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. 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 serious objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
In the intervening 150 yeas, the evidence against gradualism in the manner Darwin envisioned has only gotten worse. Following are several quotations. Prediction: I will be accused of quote mining. Those who accuse me of quote mining will have the burden of demonstrating that I am quoting all of these writers out of context, and in context they mean something other than what I appear to be quoting them for. Second prediction: There will be much bluster and bluffing, but none of my accusers will be able to back up their charge.
No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of changeover millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that’s how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.
Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 95.
“The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.” Steven M. Stanley, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1979), 39.
When we view Darwinian gradualism on a geological timescale, we may expect to find in the fossil record a long series of intermediate forms connecting phenotypes of ancestral and descendant populations. This predicted pattern is called phyletic gradualism. Darwin recognized that phyletic gradualism is not often revealed by the fossil record. Studies conducted since Darwin’s time likewise have failed to produce the continuous series of fossils predicted by phyletic gradualism. Is the theory of gradualism therefore refuted? Darwin and others claim that it is not, because the fossil record is too imperfect to preserve transitional series . . . Others have argued, however, that the abrupt origins and extinctions of species in the fossil record force us to conclude that phyletic gradualism is rare. A number of contemporary biologists, however, favor various hypotheses of the punctuated equilibrium theory . . . They base their hypotheses on fossil records which have large ‘chains’ of missing organisms. Although missing-link fossils are occasionally discovered, the record does little to support Darwin’s concept of gradual, long-term change . . . Others opposed to hypotheses of evolution through sudden change argue that because such a tiny percentage of organisms becomes fossilized . . . drawing definite conclusions from fossil evidence about evolution through either gradual or sudden change is not warranted.
Cleveland Hickman, Jr., Larry S. Roberts, and Allan Larson, Animal Diversity (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000), 23, 261.
“Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It was primarily a prejudice of nineteenth-century liberalism facing a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life’s history.” Stephen Jay Gould, “An Early Start,” Natural History 87, February 1978): 24.
“I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism . . . I wish only to point out that it was never ‘seen’ in the rocks.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History 86 (May 1977), 14, 12-16.
“The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change . . .” Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History 86 (June/July 1977): 22, 22-30.
The word ‘evolution’ means unfolding, and for more than a century biologists have portrayed the evolution of life as a gradual unfolding of new living things from old, the slow molding of animals and plants into entirely different forms. It was this persistent style of change that Darwin described as The Origin of Species. Today the fossil record – a rich source of information that was long untapped – is forcing us to revise this conventional view of evolution. As it turns out, myriads of species have inhabited the Earth for millions of years without evolving noticeably. On the other hand, evolutionary transitions have been wrought during episodes of rapid change, when new species have quickly budded off from old ones. In short evolution has moved by fits and starts.
Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 3-4.
“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 and Ian Tattersall, The Myth of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 45-46.
“The fossil record flatly fails to substantiate this expectation of finely graded change.” Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myth of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 163.
“Palaeobiologists flocked to these scientific visions of a world in a constant state of flux and admixture. But instead of finding the slow, smooth and progressive changes Lyell and Darwin had expected, they saw in the fossil records rapid bursts of change, new species appearing seemingly out of nowhere and then remaining unchanged for millions of years-patterns hauntingly reminiscent of creation.” Mark Pagel, “Happy Accidents?” review of The Pattern of Evolution, by Niles Eldredge, Nature 397 (February 25, 1999): 665.
“Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin’s postulate of gradualism . . . 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 Mayer, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 138.
[We] are still in the dark about the origin of most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus – full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin’s depiction of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless infinitesimally minute variations, which, in turn, demands that the fossil record preserve an unbroken chain of transitional forms.
Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 3.
“At the higher level of evolutionary transition between basic morphological designs, gradualism has always been in trouble, though it remains the “official” position of most Western evolutionists. Smooth intermediates between Bauplane [i.e., body plans] are almost impossible to construct, even in thought experiments; there is certainly no evidence for them in the fossil record (curious mosaics like Archaeopteryx do not count). Even so convinced a gradualist as G. G. Simpson (1944) invoked quantum evolution and inadaptive phases to explain these transitions.” Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria: the Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,” Paleobiology 3 (1977): 147, 115-147.
“Perhaps we should not be surprised that vertebrate paleontologists did not support the prevailing view of slow, progressive evolution but tended to elaborate theories involving saltation, orthogenesis, or other vitalistic hypotheses. Most of the evidence provided by the fossil record does not support a strictly gradualistic interpretation, as pointed out by Eldredge and Gould (1972), Gould and Eldredge (1977), Gould (1985), and Stanley (1979, 1982).” Robert L. Carroll, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1988), 4 (emphasis in original).
“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, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology 6 (January 1980): 127, 119-130.
The Modern Synthesis was perhaps not so much a true synthesis as it was a victory for gradualistic genetics [but the] known fossil record is not, and never has been, in accord with gradualism. What is remarkable is that, through a variety of historical circumstances, even the history of opposition has been obscured. Few modern paleontologists seem to have recognized that in the past century, as the biological historian William Coleman has recently written, ‘The majority of paleontologists felt their evidence simply contradicted Darwin’s stress on minute, slow, and cumulative changes leading to species transformation.’ In the next chapter I will describe not only what the fossils have to say, but why their story has been suppressed.
Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 71.
“With the benefit of hindsight, it is amazing that paleontologists could have accepted gradual evolution as a universal pattern on the basis of a handful of supposedly well-documented lineages (e.g. Gryphaea, Micraster, Zaphrentis) none of which actually withstands close scrutiny.” Christopher R.C. Paul, “Patterns of Evolution and Extinction in Invertebrates,” K.C. Allen and D.E.G. Briggs, eds., Evolution and the Fossil Record (Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 105.
“Undeniably, the fossil record has provided disappointingly few gradual series. The origins of many groups are still not documented at all.” Douglas J. Futuyama, The Case for Evolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 190-91.
“The main problem with such phyletic gradualism is that the fossil record provides so little evidence for it. Very rarely can we trace the gradual transformation of one entire species into another through a finely graded sequence of intermediary forms.”
Salvador Luria, Stephen Jay Gould and Sam Singer, A View of Life (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1981), 641.
Paleontologists have paid an enormous price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study . . . The history of most fossil species includes tow [sic] features particularly 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; morphological change I [sic] usually limited and directionless. 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, “The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change,” in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections In Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980), 181-182.
“We would not have predicted stasis from population genetics, but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.” Francisco J. Ayala, quoted in Roger Lewin, “Evolutionary Theory Under Fire,” Science 210 (November 21, 1980): 884.
“[I]f we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find – over and over again – not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.” Derek V. Ager, “The Nature of the Fossil Record,” 87 Proceedings of the British Geological Association 87 (1976): 133.
Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document 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. New types often appear quite suddenly, and their intermediate ancestors are absent in the earlier geologic strata. The discovery of unbroken series of species changing gradually into descending species is very rare. Indeed the fossil record is one of discontinuities, seemingly documenting jumps (saltations) from one type of organism to a different type. This raises a puzzling question: Why does the fossil record fail to reflect the gradual change one would expect from evolution?
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 14
“. . . the tale itself illustrates the central fact of the fossil record so well [the] geologically abrupt origin and subsequent extended stasis of most species . . . Anatomy may fluctuate through time, but the last remnants of a species look pretty much like the first representatives.” Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 749.
“In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms.” Tom S. Kemp, Fossils and Evolution (New York; Oxford University Press, 1999), 246.
“It is a simple ineluctable truth that virtually all members of a biota remain basically stable, with minor fluctuations, throughout their duration . . .” Niles Eldredge, The Pattern of Evolution (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1998), 157.
“. . .the greatest and most biologically astute paleontologist of the 20th century . . . acknowledged the literal appearance of stasis and geologically abrupt origin as the outstanding general fact of the fossil record and as a pattern which would ‘pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life.’” Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 755, quoting George Gaylord Simpson, Simpson cite.
“Anatomy may fluctuate over time, but the last remnants of a species usually look pretty much like the first representatives . . . The great majority of species do not show any appreciable evolutionary change at all. These species appear in the section (first occurrence) without obvious ancestors in the underlying beds, are stable once established and disappear higher up without leaving any descendants.” Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 749, 753.
“. . . one of the most striking and potentially embarrassing features of the fossil record [is that the] majority of major groups appear suddenly in the rocks, with virtually no evidence of transition from their ancestors.” Douglas J. Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 82.
“The record certainly did not reveal gradual transformations of structure in the course of time. On the contrary, it showed that species generally remained constant throughout their history and were replaced quite suddenly by significantly different forms. New types or classes seemed to appear fully formed, with no sign of an evolutionary trend by which they could have emerged from an earlier type.” Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 187.
The facts of greatest general importance are the following. When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions. Afterwards, a slow evolution follows; this frequently has the appearance of a gradual change, step by step, though down to the generic level abrupt major steps without transitions occur. At the end of such a series, a kind of evolutionary running-wild frequently is observed. Giant forms appear, and odd or pathological types of different kinds precede the extinction of such a line.
Richard B. Goldschmidt, “Evolution, as Viewed by One Geneticist,” American Scientist 40 (January 1952), 97.
This extraordinary abundance of some fossils illustrates something important about the history of life. Evolution is a theory about change through time – ‘descent with modification,’ in Darwin’s words. Yet when fossils are most abundant during substantial stretches of time, well-represented species are usually stable throughout their temporal range or alter so little and in such superficial ways (usually in size alone) that an extrapolation of observed change into longer periods of geological time could not possibly yield the extensive modifications that mark general pathways of evolution in larger groups. Most of the time, when the evidence is best, nothing much happens to most species.
Stephen Jay Gould, “Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness,” in Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1993), 275-8.
The Eldredge-Gould concept of punctuated equilibria has gained wide acceptance among paleontologists. It attempts to account for the following paradox: Within continuously sampled lineages, one rarely finds the gradual morphological trends predicted by Darwinian evolution; rather, change occurs with the sudden appearance of new, well-differentiated species. Eldredge and Gould equate such appearances with speciation, although the details of these events are not preserved . . . The punctuated equilibrium model has been widely accepted, not because it has a compelling theoretical basis but because it appears to resolve a dilemma. Apart from the obvious sampling problems inherent to the observations that stimulated the model, and apart from its intrinsic circularity (one could argue that speciation can occur only when phyletic change is rapid, not vice versa), the model is more ad hoc explanation than theory, and it rests on shaky ground.
Robert E. Ricklefs, “Paleontologists Confronting Macroevolution, review of Patterns of Evolution as Illustrated by the Fossil Record, ed. A. Hallam, Science 199 (January 6, 1978): 59.
“In spite of these examples, it remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families and that nearly all new categories above the level of families appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.” George Gaylord Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 360.
The only illustration Darwin published in On the Origin of Species was a diagram depicting his view of evolution: species descendant from a common ancestor; gradual change of organisms over time; episodes of diversification and extinction of species. Given the simplicity of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it was reasonable for paleontologists to believe that they should be able to demonstrate with the hard evidence provided by fossils both the thread of life and the gradual transformation of one species into another. Although paleontologists have, and continue to claim to have, discovered sequences of fossils that do indeed present a picture of gradual change over time, the truth of the matter is that we are still in the dark about the origin of most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus – full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin’s depiction of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless infinitesimally minute variations, which, in turn, demands that the fossil record preserve an unbroken chain of transitional forms.
Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 3.
“Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. and it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find.” David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, 50 (January 1979): 23, 22-29.
“The record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much.” Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 110.
“We have long known about stasis and abrupt appearance, but have chosen to fob it off upon an imperfect fossil record.” Gould, Stephen J., “The Paradox of the First Tier: An Agenda for Paleobiology,” Paleobiology 11 (1985): 7, 2-12.
Darwin and most subsequent authors including G. G. Simpson have held that most evolutionary transitions occur within established lineages by phyletic gradualism guided by natural selection. But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition . . . An alternative model of evolution, that of punctuated equilibria, introduced by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in the early 1970s, more fully accounts for these same observations.
D. S. Woodroff, review of Macroevolution: Pattern and Process, by Steven M. Stanley, Science, 208 (1980): 716, 716-17.
Stasis, or nonchange, of most fossil species during their lengthy geological lifespans was tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but almost never studied explicitly because prevailing theory treated stasis as uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution. …The overwhelming prevalence of stasis became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record, best left ignored as a manifestation of nothing (that is, nonevolution).
“Stasis has become interesting as a central prediction of our theory.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Opus 200,” Natural History (August 1991): 16, 12-19.
“Before Niles Eldredge and I proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972, the stasis, or nonchange, of most fossil species during their lengthy geological lifespans was tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but almost never studied explicitly because prevailing theory treated stasis as uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution . . . The overwhelming prevalence of stasis became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record, best left ignored as a manifestation of nothing (that is, nonevolution). Stephen Jay Gould, “Cordelia’s Dilemma,” Natural History 102.2 (February 1993): 15, 10-18.
At the core of punctuated equilibria lies an empirical observation: once evolved, species tend to remain remarkably stable, recognizable entities for millions of years. The observation is by no means new, nearly every paleontologist who reviewed Darwin’s Origin of Species pointed to his evasion of this salient feature of the fossil record. But stasis was conveniently dropped as a feature of life’s history to he reckoned with in evolutionary biology. And stasis had continued to be ignored until Gould and I showed that such stability is a real aspect of life’s history which must be confronted – and that, in fact, it posed no fundamental threat to the basic notion of evolution itself. For that was Darwin’s problem: to establish the plausibility of the very idea of evolution, Darwin felt that he had to undermine the older (and ultimately biblically based) doctrine of species fixity. Stasis, to Darwin, was an ugly inconvenience.
Niles Eldredge, Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 188-189.
The main impetus for expanding the view that species are discrete at any one point in time, to embrace their entire history, comes from the fossil record. Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. Instead, collections of nearly identical specimens, separated in some cases by 5 million years, suggested that the overwhelming majority of animal and plant species were tremendously conservative throughout their histories. That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself, troubled by the stubbornness of the fossil record in refusing to yield abundant examples of gradual change, devoted two chapters to the fossil record. To preserve his argument he was forced to assert that the fossil record was too incomplete, to full of gaps, to produce the expected patterns of change. He prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search and then his major thesis – that evolutionary change is gradual and progressive – would be vindicated. One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin’s predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong. 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. Rather than challenge well-entrenched evolutionary theory, paleontologists tacitly agreed with their zoological colleagues that the fossil record was too poor to do much beyond supporting, in a general sort of way, the basic thesis that life had evolved.
Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myth of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 45-46.
“The principal problem is morphological stasis. A theory is only as good as its predictions, and conventional neo-Darwinism, which claims to be a comprehensive explanation of evolutionary process, has failed to predict the widespread long-term morphological stasis now recognized as one of the most striking aspects of the fossil record.” Peter G. Williamson, “Morphological Stasis and Developmental Constraint: Real Problems for Neo-Darwinism,” Nature 294 (November 19, 1981): 214
Simple extrapolation does not work. I found that out back in the 1960s as I tried in vain to document examples of the kind of slow, steady directional change we all thought ought to be there, ever since Darwin told us that natural selection should leave precisely such a telltale signal as we collect our fossils up cliff faces. I found instead, that once species appear in the fossil record, they tend not to change much at all . Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to chance as a matter of course.
Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 3.
“Stasis is now abundantly well documented as the preeminent paleontological pattern in the evolutionary history of species.” Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 77.
“The record certainly did not reveal gradual transformations of structure in the course of time. On the contrary, it showed that species generally remained constant throughout their history and were replaced quite suddenly by significantly different forms. New types or classes seemed to appear fully formed, with no sign of an evolutionary trend by which they could have emerged from an earlier type.” Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 187.
“Many species remain virtually unchanged for millions of years, then suddenly disappear to be replaced by a quite different, but related, form. Moreover, most major groups of animals appear abruptly in the fossil record, fully formed, and with no fossils yet discovered that form a transition from their parent grou Thus, it has seldom been possible to piece together ancestor-dependent sequences from the fossil record that show gradual, smooth transitions between species.” Cleveland Hickman, Jr., Larry S. Roberts, and F. M. Hickman, Integrated Principles of Zoology (St. Lewis, MO: Times Mirror/Moseby College Publishing, 1988), 866.
No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of changeover millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that’s how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.
Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 95.
But we saw – as did several paleontological contemporaries of Darwin – that if you do collect a series of fossils up through a sequence of sedimentary rock, and if you don’t see much evidence of anatomical change through that series, that is indeed evidence that substantial gradual evolutionary change has not occurred within that species lineage, no matter how gappy the record may be. That’s why the evidence for stasis now appears so overwhelming.
Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 96.
“Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It was primarily a prejudice of nineteenth-century liberalism facing a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life’s history.” Stephen Jay Gould, “An Early Start,” Natural History 87, February 1978): 24.