Gould Speaks
Stephen Jay Gould, a well-known evolutionist and professor of geology and paleontology at Harvard University, has stated, "The extreme rarity of transitional forms 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 the branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."
He also stated: "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."
Horse Evolution
Approved North Carolina biology textbooks hold up the so-called "horse series" as proof of evolution. Dr. Niles Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum in New York, has said: ".. . the most famous example. .. still on exhibit downstairs is the exhibit on horse evolution.. . That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook.. . [T]he people who propose these kinds of stories themselves may be aware of the speculative nature of some of the stuff. But by the time it filters down to the textbooks, we've got science as truth and we've got a problem."
Human Evolution
In 1982, Dr. Lyall Watson stated: "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 single coffin!" (Science Digest, vol. 90, May '82 p. 44).
Archaeopteryx
Alan Feduccia, an ornithologist and expert on bird evolution, noted in a 1993 article in Science, "Archaeopteryx probably cannot tell us much about the early origins of feathers and flight in true protobirds because Archaeopteryx was, in a modern sense, a bird."
John Ostrom of Yale said, "It is obvious that we must now look for the ancestors of birds in a period of time much older than that in which Archaeopteryx lived."
Pough, Heiser, and McFarland unquivocally state in their text Vertebrate Life 3rd ed. (New York: McMillan, 1989), pp. 468, 470, " No intermediate fossils link Archaeopteryx with any of the groups from which it might have evolved."
Mark Norrell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, acknowledged in a recent Washington Post story that few paleontologists still believe that Archaeopteryx is a direct ancestor of modern birds (see, John Schwartz, " New Evolution Research Ruffles Some Feathers," Washington Post 11/15/96, A3).
Concerning the alleged dinosaur ancestry of birds, ornithologist Alan Feduccia declared in Science (11/1/96, p. 721), "It is biophysically impossible to evolve flight from such large bipeds with foreshortened limbs and heavy, balancing tails" (because as noted by the writer of the article, that is exactly the wrong anatomy for flight). Fedducia stated, "In my opinion, the theropod origin of birds will be the greatest embarrassment of paleontology in the 20th century."