Evolution Quote by Steven M. Stanley

If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

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

It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families,…

— 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

The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution i.e., a species becoming a new species accomplishing a major morphological…

— Steven M. Stanley

“Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and palaeontology does not provide them.”

— David Kitts

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

We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition…

— David M. Raup

“There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary…

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

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