Henry Gee Quotes

• 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.

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  Henry Gee

  Mean   Scarcity   Stories  

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• Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.

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  Henry Gee

  Patterns   Becoming   Process  

  Henry Gee (1999). “In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life”, p.136, Cornell University Press

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• Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose.

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  Henry Gee

  Memories   Purpose   Variation  

  Henry Gee (1999). “In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life”, p.96, Cornell University Press

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