Quotes FROM scientists ABOUT evolution!

The Fossil Record / Geologic Column

"The extreme rarity of the transitional form in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.  The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."- Stephan Jay Gould, Harvard University

"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?  Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory."- Charles Darwin

"Everyone knows all fossils are fickle.  Bones will play any song you want them to play!"- Dr. Shreeves, Nature

"Contrary to what most scientist write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."
Ronald P. West, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Paleontology
Kansas State University

"A circular argument arises:  Interpret the fossil record in the terms of a particular theory in evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory.  Well, it would, wouldn't it?" Tom Kemp, "A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record," New Scientist, Vol. 108, Dec. 5, 1985, p. 67

"The [revolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved."
W. E. Swinton
British Museum of Natural History
London

Human Evolution

"We're not just evolving slowly.  For all practical purposes we're not evolving.  There's no reason to think we're going to get bigger brains or smaller toes or whatever- we are what we are."- Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University

"In recent years several authors have written popular books on human origins which were based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and objectivity. At the moment science cannot offer a full answer on the origin of humanity..."
Dr. Robert Martin
Senior Research Fellow
Zoological Society of London

"The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a coffin!"
Dr. Lyall Watson
"The Water People," Science Digest
vol. 90 (May 1982) p.44

"The missing link between man and the apes...is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures. In the fossil record, missing links are the rule: the story of life is as
disjointed as a silent newsreel, in which species succeed one another as abruptly as Balkan prime ministers. The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more
they have been frustrated... Evidence from fossils now points overwhelmingly away from the classical Darwinism which most Americans learned in high school..." [Newsweek, Is Man a Subtle Accident? Nov. 3, 1980 p. 95.]

The Theory Itself

"Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."
Professor Louis Bounoure
Former President, Biological Society of Strasbourg
Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum

"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever. In explaining evolution, we do not have one iota of fact."
Dr. T. N. Tahmisian
Atomic Energy Commission, USA

"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."
Malcolm Muggeridge
World-famous journalist and philosopher

"It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary   stories I learned as a student...have now been debunked." [Dr. Derek V. Ager (Department of Geology, Imperial College, London), ‘The nature of the fossil record'. Proceedings of the Geological Association, Vol. 87 (2), 1976, pp. 132-133.]

"The universe we see when we look out to it's furthest horizons contains a hundred billion galaxies. Each of these galaxies contains another hundred billion stars. The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form. There's no lack of ideas, of course; we just can't substantiate them."
M. Harwit
noted astrophysicist

What Colin Patterson, Senior Principal Scientific Officer of the Paleontology Dept. of the British Museum of Natural History, said at a scientific convention (to the horror of many of the attendees):

"Last year I had a sudden realization.  For over twenty years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way.  One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night; and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it.  That's quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled so long...So for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people...Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true?...All I got... was silence... The absence of answers seems to suggest that... evolution does not convey any knowledge, or, if so, I haven't yet heard it... I think many people in this room would acknowledge that during the last few years, if you had thought about it at all, you have experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith.  I know that it's true of me and I think it is true of a good many of you here... Evolution not only conveys no knowledge but seems somehow to convey antiknowledge."

About this faith, a man named Lunn once said, "Faith is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links unseen."