A Quote by Steven M. Stanley

Established species are evolving so slowly that major transitions between genera and higher taxa must be occurring within small rapidly evolving populations that leave NO LEGIBLE FOSSIL RECORD.

Steven M. Stanley

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Between Established Evolving Fossil Higher Leave Major Must Rapidly Record Slowly Small Species Within

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Steven M. Stanley
Born: November 2, 1941

If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera. A new species does not evolve in the area of its ancestors; it does not arise from the slow transformation of all its forbears. co-author with Niles Eldridge

Stephen Jay Gould

The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life.

Hermann Hesse

I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.

Asa Gray

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 transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.

Steven M. Stanley

I'm going to keep evolving and evolving and showing people that progression is key when it comes to music.

Lil Xan

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.

A. Philip Randolph

Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates.

Ernst Mayr

The evening news is evolving rapidly, and I think we have to be extraordinarily nimble.

David Muir

Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.

Larry Niven

There are about 250,000 different species of fossil plants and animals known . . In spite of this large quantity of information, it is but a tiny fraction of the diversity that [according to the theory] actually lived in the past. There are well over a million species living today and . . [it is] possible to predict how many species ought to be in our fossil record. That number is at least 100 times the number we have found.

David M. Raup

The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations.

Ernst Mayr

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.

Stephen Jay Gould

Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.

Diane Ackerman

So far, we have been able to study only one evolving system and we cannot wait for interstellar flight to provide us with a second. If we want to discover generalizations about evolving systems, we will have to look at artificial ones.

John Maynard Smith

Survivor species tend to have huge populations, so they can afford to lose many individuals and still survive as a species. They also tend to be small. If you're small, you need less food - which is great in a situation where famine is everywhere.

Annalee Newitz

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.

George C. Williams

A Quote by Steven M. Stanley

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