“I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. 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 never see the very process we profess to study. Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. I wish only to point out that it was never -seen- in the rocks. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). "The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps, He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory."ĭarwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: The evolutionary trees that adorn our text- books have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
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