{"quotes":[{"text":"Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.","author":"Honoré de Balzac","tags":["baron-georges-cuvier","civilization","cuvier","discoverer","discovery","feeble","fossils","genius","geology","george-byron","george-gordon-byron","george-gordon-noel","george-gordon-noel-byron","georges-cuvier","historian","immensity","lord-byron","memory","mind","montmartre","natural","poet","poetry","science","space","time","treatise","turmoil","urals"],"id":16338,"author_id":"Honor%C3%A9+de+Balzac"},{"text":"No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.","author":"Henry Gee","tags":["biology","confessions-of-the-darwinists","darwin","darwinism","darwinist-confessions","evolution","fossil-record","fossils","macro-evolution","macroevolution","neo-darwinism","paleontology","science"],"id":30607,"author_id":"Henry+Gee"},{"text":"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 the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.","author":"Charles Darwin","tags":["biology","conclusion-before-evidence","darwinism","evolution","fossil-record","fossils","intermediate-forms","macro-evolution","macroevolution","missing-links","paleontology"],"id":78870,"author_id":"Charles+Darwin"},{"text":"The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.","author":"Antonio Gramsci","tags":["culture","fossils","language","living","outdated"],"id":88376,"author_id":"Antonio+Gramsci"},{"text":"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.","author":"Richard E. Leakey","tags":["accident","biology","earth","evolution","fossil-record","fossils","history","homo-sapiens","mortality","science"],"id":91242,"author_id":"Richard+E.+Leakey"},{"text":"What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.","author":"John Lubbock","tags":["artists","botanists","farmer","flowers","fossils","game","geologists","inspirational","perspective","seeing","sight","sportsmen"],"id":93211,"author_id":"John+Lubbock"},{"text":"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.","author":"Gareth J. Nelson","tags":["biology","darwin","darwinism","evolution","fossil-record","fossils","macro-evolution","macroevolution","neo-darwinism","paleontology","science"],"id":185394,"author_id":"Gareth+J.+Nelson"},{"text":"If we were fossils of two snails caught in a rock for millions of years.Would we know we were together?","author":"Natasha Tsakos","tags":["awareness","evolution","fossils","perspective"],"id":188377,"author_id":"Natasha+Tsakos"},{"text":"Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance with the requirements of the doctrine of evolution, and often afford convincing evidence of it. At the same time, it has been shown that certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.","author":"Thomas Henry Huxley","tags":["biology","contingent","convincing","development","evidence","evolution","examine","fossils","living","matter","morphology","nature","remains","requirement","science"],"id":295432,"author_id":"Thomas+Henry+Huxley"},{"text":"Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.","author":"Duane T. Gish","tags":["bible","creation","evolution","fossils","religion","science"],"id":323751,"author_id":"Duane+T.+Gish"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":15,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}