Categories Quote by George Gaylord Simpson

Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record…

— Anonymous

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…

— Ernst Mayr

Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely.

— George Gaylord Simpson

Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually…

— Ernst Mayr

Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this…

— Ernst Mayr

Established species are evolving so slowly that major transitions between genera and higher taxa must be occurring within small rapidly evolving populations that leave…

— Steven M. Stanley

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design or stupidity, I…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.

— Soren Kierkegaard

All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species-of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of…

— Hugh Miller

“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,…

— Gareth J. Nelson

If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera.…

— Stephen Jay Gould