Fossils Quotes - Page 8

• No matter what else happens, this is the century in which we must learn to live without fossil fuel.

  David Goodstein

  Fuel, Matter, Climate Change

  David Goodstein, Michael Intriligator (2012). “Climate Change and the Energy Problem: Physical Science and Economics Perspective”, p.23, World Scientific Publishing Co Inc

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• Our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value encourages drilling without taking into account the costs to the ocean, even without major spills.

  Sylvia Earle

  Ocean, Cost, Fuel

  "Sylvia Earle Talks Gulf Oil Spill Effects In Exclusive Interview". Interview with Joanna Zelman, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 13, 2011.

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• I think that the world is in the middle of a huge transition that we have to make to renewable energy. We have to transition away from fossil fuels very, very quickly.

  Josh Fox

  Thinking, Energy, Transition

  "Sundance ’10 | “GASLAND” Director Josh Fox on Being a One Man Crew". www.indiewire.com. January 22, 2010.

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• Certainly the first true humans were unique by virtue of their large brains. It was because the human brain is so large when compared with that of a chimpanzee that paleontologists for years hunted for a half-ape, half-human skeleton that would provide a fossil link between the human and the ape.

  Jane Goodall

  Unique, Years, Skeletons

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• It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.

  James Hansen

  Long, Energy, Burning

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• If a power station were to be built down the road, I'd prefer a nuclear plant over an oil burner, and definitely over a coal burner. We simply have to lessen our consumption of fossil fuels.

  James Lovelock

  Oil, Fuel, Nuclear

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• The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Years, Understanding

  "Religion's regressive hold on animal rights issues" by Peter Singer, www.theguardian.com. June 08, 2010.

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• The truth is, as most of us know, that global warming is real and humans are major contributors, mainly because we wastefully burn fossil fuels.

  David Suzuki

  Real, Burning Fossil Fuels, Global Warming

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• The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Stars, Past, Light

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• I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

  Sylvia Plath

  Numb

  Richard M. Matovich, Sylvia Plath (1986). “A concordance to The collected poems of Sylvia Plath”, Scholarly Title

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• Who knew that the devil had a factory where he made millions of fossils, which his minions distributed throughout the earth, in order to confuse my tiny brain?

  Lewis Black

  Funny, Atheist, Humor

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• Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water.

  Richard Dawkins

  Strong, Hands, Water

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.154, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In order to survive, an animal must be born into a favoring or at least tolerant environment. Similarly, in order to achieve preservation and recognition, a specimen of fossil man must be discovered in intelligence, attested by scientific knowledge, and interpreted by evolutionary experience. These rigorous prerequisites have undoubtedly caused many still-births in human palaeontology and are partly responsible for the high infant mortality of discoveries of geologically ancient man.

  Earnest Hooton

  Knowledge, Science, Animal

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• On a perfect planet such as might be acceptable to a physicist, one might predict that from its origin the diversity of life would grow exponentially until the carrying capacity, however defined, was reached. The fossil record on Earth, however, tells a very different story.

  Simon Conway Morris

  Life, Science, Perfect

  "Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, Springer Science & Business Media, p. 83". en.wikiquote.org. December 10, 2003.

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• Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.

  Lynn Margulis

  Issues, Environmental, Groups

  Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan (2013). “Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution”, p.100, Springer Science & Business Media

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• The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.

  Richard Dawkins

  Space, Islands, Religion

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• We may affirm of Mr. Buffon, that which has been said of the chemists of old; though he may have failed in attaining his principal aim, of establishing a theory, yet he has brought together such a multitude of facts relative to the history of the earth, and the nature of its fossil productions, that curiosity finds ample compensation, even while it feels the want of conviction.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Nature, Science, Curiosity

  Oliver Goldsmith (1847). “A history of the earth and animated nature, with an intr. view of the animal kingdom tr. from the Fr. of baron Cuvier, notes [and] a life of the author by W. Irving”, p.73

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• It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to ascertain, with the utmost certainty, that our earth has not always been covered over by the same external crust, because we are thoroughly assured that the organized bodies to which these fossil remains belong must have lived upon the surface before they came to be buried, as they now are, at a great depth.

  Georges Cuvier

  Science, Depth, Body

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• Today, in directly harnessing the power of the Sun, we're taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.

  Jimmy Carter

  God, Science, Power

  United States. President (1977-1981 : Carter), Jimmy Carter (1979). “Jimmy Carter”

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• Placed as the fossils are in their several tiers of burial-places the one over the other; we have in them true witnesses of successive existences, whilst the historian of man is constantly at fault as to dates and even the sequence of events, to say nothing of the contradicting statements which he is forced to reconcile.

  Roderick Murchison

  Science, Men, Events

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• Of what use are the great number of petrifactions, of different species, shape and form which are dug up by naturalists? Perhaps the collection of such specimens is sheer vanity and inquisitiveness. I do not presume to say; but we find in our mountains the rarest animals, shells, mussels, and corals embalmed in stone, as it were, living specimens of which are now being sought in vain throughout Europe. These stones alone whisper in the midst of general silence.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Science, Animal, Vanity

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• I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind?

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Religious, Nice, Intelligent

  "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids". Essay by Arthur C. Clarke for journal "Science" (pp. 1532-1533), June 5, 1998.

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• One must believe that every living thing whatsoever must change insensibly in its organization and in its form... One must therefore never expect to find among living species all those which are found in the fossil state, and yet one may not assume that any species has really been lost or rendered extinct.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Believe, Science, Organization

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• I shall discuss the broad patterns of hominoid evolution, an exercise made enjoyable by the need to integrate diverse kinds of information, and use that as a vehicle to speculate about hominoid origins, an event for which there is no recognized fossil record. Hence, an opportunity to exercise some imagination.

  David Pilbeam

  Exercise, Opportunity, Imagination

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• Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

  Al Purdy

  Time, Fall, Autumn

  1962 Poems forAll theAnnettes,'Pause' (revised1968).

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