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Section 3: Quotations from Scientists

Other Problems With the Theory

All Types Seem Specialized

J.S. Huxley, Evolution, the Modern Synthesis (Allen & Unwin, London, 1942), pp. 562, 571.

....And there is no certain case on record of a line showing a high degree of specialization giving rise to a new type. All new types which themselves are capable of adaptive radiation seem to have been produced by relatively unspecialized ancestral lines. ..Evolution is thus seen as a series of blind alleys.

E.S. Russell, "The Diversity of Animals," Acta Biotheoretica, vol. 13 (Suppl. 1), p. 1.

Existing species represent the terminal twigs of a vast process of differentiation; each is stamped not only with the characters of the genus, the family, the order, the class to which it belongs--the characters, that is to say, of the branch and trunk from which it has sprung. It may proliferate further twigs, producing new species and possibly even new genera...but there is no possibility of its producing new branches. That new types of organization, even minor ones, can be evolved from the specialized end-products of the great evolutionary tree seems a rank impossibility.

G.G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (Bantam Books, New York, p. 298.

It has been suggested that all animals are now specialized and that the generalized forms on which major evolutionary developments depend are absent. In fact all animals have always been more or less specialized and a really generalized living form is merely a myth or an abstraction. It happens that there are still in existence some of the less specialized, that is, less narrowly adapted and more adaptable, forms from which radiations have occurred and could as far as we can see occur again. Opossums are not notably more specialized now than in the Cretaceous and could almost certainly radiate again markedly if available spaces were to concur again. ...

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