Evolution Quotes

“[N]early every creationist debater will mention the second law of thermodynamics and argue that complex systems like the earth and life cannot evolve, because the second law seems to say that everything in nature is running down and losing energy, not getting more complex. But that's NOT what the second law says; every creationist has heard this but refuses to acknowledge it. The second law only applies to closed systems, like a sealed jar of heated gases that gradually cools down and loses energy. But the earth is not a closed system -- it constantly gets new energy from the sun, and this (through photosynthesis) is what powers life and makes it possible for life to become more complex and evolve. It seems odd that the creationists continue to misuse the second law of thermodynamics when they have been corrected over and over again, but the reason is simple: it sounds impressive to their audience with limited science education, and if a snow job works, you stay with it.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Some Americans brought their religion and their politics into alignment by adjusting their political views to their religious faith. But, surprisingly, more of them adjusted their religion to fit their politics.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“We can all speculate about why younger generations are alienated from organized religion, and certainly there are many reasons. But knowing the current political trends in this country, we might suggest that one factor of great importance is how “organized religion” in this country is largely dominated by the shrill and intolerant evangelicals and their hate-filled message against science, gays, women, and minorities. With the incredibly rapid shift in this country toward majority acceptance of gays (who are overwhelmingly supported by young people, among whom homophobia and religious intolerance is rare), it might seem that such an issue is driving people away from religious zealots in politics, and their causes. Sure enough, that is confirmed by recent polling. The Pew Study cited earlier shows almost mirror-image percentages: those who are “unaffiliated” are largely supportive of gay rights and abortion rights; those who are religious are just the opposite. Another study drives the point home in stark relief. The single biggest factor driving people away from churches is indeed the intolerance and hatred shown by the evangelicals, and how they have manifested this whenever they have secured political power. As the Los Angeles Times describes it, this is a striking change from only 30 years”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“science cannot be subservient to ideology and be forced to compromise the truth in order to please the political leadership.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“A more concrete example happened in 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Apparently, to the creationists, lying and deception are lesser sins than accepting evolution, and they are willing to sacrifice their integrity in their crusade against what they believe to be the source of all evils in the world.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“The key point to all of this is that science is self-correcting. Individual scientists can make mistakes or be misled by their biases, but there are so many other hard-boiled skeptical scientific critics out there that mistakes are soon caught and corrected.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Throughout the second half of this book, we have documented example after example of transitional forms in everything from microfossils to mollusks to mammals. We could continue to do this for hundreds of pages more, but it wouldn’t really make a difference to the creationists or to those who are confused and misled by them.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“everything we thought we knew about Mesozoic birds before 1990 is obsolete. Each year brings astonishing new specimens that further transform what we thought we knew about avian evolution.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Wells (2000) ignores nearly all of them except for one specimen, named “Archaeoraptor,” which was a composite forged out of two real fossils by an unknown Chinese fossil dealer. Smuggled out of China, the specimen was bought and made into a big deal by amateur dinosaur illustrators (and by National Geographic, which wanted to get a scoop without waiting for the specimen to be tested by peer review). As soon as well-trained paleontologists looked at the specimen, they quickly detected that it was a composite of two different specimens put together to enhance its sale price, and the specimen was never even formally published in a peer-reviewed journal. Wells (2000) slanders the entire profession by suggesting that one artful hoax (which was quickly exposed as soon as real paleontologists looked at it) implies that all the fossils from China are faked or that qualified paleontologists are easily suckered by fakes. As the facts of the story show, Wells is wrong on all counts.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“The most earth-shaking discoveries come from the famous Lower Cretaceous Liaoning fossil beds of China, which have now become one of the world’s most important fossil deposits. These delicate lake shales preserve extraordinary features in fossils, including body outlines, feathers, and fur, as well as complete articulated skeletons with not a single bone missing. In the past 20 years, a major new discovery has been announced from these deposits every few months, and almost all previous ideas about birds and dinosaurs were quickly rendered obsolete by these discoveries”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“If Archaeopteryx were still the only transitional dinosaur-bird fossil, it would be sufficient, but it is not alone any more.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“all these arguments of the creationists, as well as the “birds are not dinosaurs” minority like Martin and Feduccia, are now rendered entirely obsolete by an amazing array of new discoveries that have occurred in the past 20 years.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Before we deal with the creationist distortions about Archaeopteryx, let us review the evidence that convinced 99 percent of legitimate scientists that birds are dinosaurs.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“they resemble the creationists, who attack one tiny detail of the subject without addressing all the rest of the evidence.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“As usual, Gish hadn’t done his homework or bothered to read more recent sources. The fact that he cited an out-of-context quotation from Weishampel et al. (1990) shows that he could apparently read a more authoritative source, but either he could not read well enough to also discover that the other transitional forms like Psittacosaurus are mentioned in the same chapter or his biases were so strong that he can only find short snippets that fit his prejudices.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Apparently Gish never bothers to read even the children’s books closely. Nearly every book about dinosaurs illustrates a group of Triassic creatures called prosauropods, whose very name (translated as “before the sauropods”) implies that they are primitive relatives of the larger sauropods”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Once again, the fossil record has answered them with a perfect transitional fossil (Li et al. 2008) that rebukes them in turn. Officially known as Odontochelys semitestacea, its name literally means “toothed turtle with half a shell.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Creationists frequently taunt scientists by pointing to an image of something as specialized as a frog and saying that there is no way they could imagine a transitional fossil between frogs and other amphibians. But in 2008, a fossil was announced that put this question to rest (Anderson et al. 2008). Formally named Gerobatrachus hottoni, it was dubbed “frogamander” by the press because it had features of both frogs and salamanders (fig. 10.11). It had a long tail and salamander-like body, but its head is short with a rounded snout like that of a frog. It also had the large eyes and large eardrum found in frogs and not salamanders.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“(Standen et al. 2014). They took populations of the African ray-finned fish known as the bichir, or Polypterus (distantly related to sturgeons and paddlefish), and made them cross over dry land over and over again. Within 8 months, the bichir that had had been raised on land had modified their ray fins and the muscles to control them so they were more efficient walkers; those that were kept in their normal water habitat did not change. The remarkable footage of these walking fish can be seen online by searching for videos of “walking fish Polypterus.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“This highly specialized anatomy of the modern forms confuses creationists. They point to the peculiarities of living Latimeria or the specialized fins of some lungfish and argue that they cannot have been ancestors of tetrapods. But once again, they are thinking of ladders when we are talking about branching bushes.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Studies of the fin motion of both coelacanths and lungfish have shown that they move their fins in a “step cycle” similar to the motion of the four limbs of tetrapods. Thus the characteristic leg motion sequence of four-legged animals was already present in lobe fins that never walked on land.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“We don’t have every possible transitional form between fishes and tetrapods, but we now have so many steps in the sequence that to deny that this transition occurred is like the neo-Nazis denying the Holocaust—it’s a self-evident fact, and there are many fossil witnesses to bear testimony.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“We mammal chauvinists like to think of the last 65 million years as the “age of mammals,” but in terms of diversity, the teleosts were evolving far faster than the mammals, and we could easily think of it as the “age of teleosts.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“the molecular-anatomical-embryological phylogeny of the animal kingdom (fig. 5.7) links mollusks and annelids; we have transitional forms, both fossil and living, between these two phyla. It also links nematodes and arthropods, and we have transitional forms, both fossil and living, between these two phyla as well. Using Hox genes, we can demonstrate how radical changes in body plans are controlled by relatively simple genetic mechanisms and allow macroevolutionary changes to take place.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“invertebrates make up more than 99 percent of all living animals on earth. In fact, insects alone outnumber all other groups of organisms in total diversity, and among insects, beetles are more diverse with more species than any other group of animals.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Lieberman (2003) showed that rates of evolution during the “Cambrian explosion” are typical of any adaptive radiation in life’s history, whether you look at the Paleocene diversification of the mammals after the nonavian dinosaurs vanished, or even the diversification of humans from their common ancestor with apes 6 million years ago.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“The most crucial deception that Meyer pulls is that he completely ignores the first two stages of the Cambrian! Nowhere in the book are the “little shellies” or the Nemakit-Dalydinian or Tommotian stages even mentioned! Naturally, if you deliberately leave out the crucial evidence of the intermediate stage of life evolving from large soft-bodied Ediacarans (which he dismisses as irrelevant because we’re not sure they are members of modern phyla) to the large shelly trilobites of the third stage of the Cambrian (Atdabanian), it will look more explosive.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“The problem with the creationists’ fascination with the Cambrian explosion is that it’s all wrong! The major groups of invertebrate fossils do not all appear suddenly at the base of the Cambrian but are spaced out over strata spanning 80 million years—hardly an instantaneous “explosion”!”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Thus, from the wild speculation of 1967, Margulis’s idea is now accepted as the best possible explanation of the origin of eukaryotes and organelles. Lynn Margulis has even received the National Medal of Science for her groundbreaking and daringly original ideas.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters