Chapter 9
"Darwin's early scientific experience was primarily as a geologist, and much of what he had to say about the nature of the fossil record was an accurate and insightful early contribution to our understanding of the vagaries of deposition and the preservation of fossils.
But his Chapter 9 ('Origin of the Species') on the imperfections of the geological record is one long ad hoc, special-pleading argument designed to rationalize, to flat-out explain away, the differences between what he saw as logical predictions derived from his theory and the facts of the fossil record."| | Niles Eldredge,
Chairman and Curator of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural History. "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York, 1985, pp.27-28 |
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