Becoming Quote by Steven M. Stanley

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

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

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

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

— David Kitts

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

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

We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields…

— Michael Shermer

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

“For evolution to be true, there would have been innumerable transitional forms between different types of creatures. Therefore, for every known fossil species, many…

— Jonathan Sarfati

The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see…

— Stephen Jay Gould