Arthur Koestler Quotes

Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.

Paleontologists do not have to search for famous "missing link" from which humans supposedly came, and current great apes. This link is simply the socialist - because he has both monkey genes.

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

I kept an open mind on the question of whether a hominid had been present in Europe in the early Pleistocene.

But what really excited me was the idea that humans had a tremendous pre-history that went back millions of years. I wanted to go to Africa to find some of these creatures.

Evolution isn't true, because if we evolved from monkeys, how can they still be here?

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past.

Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton.

Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.

Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.

I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human.

I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.

Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link.

There is no foundation in geological facts, for the popular theory of the successive development of the animal and vegetable world, from the simplest to the most perfect forms.

It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this [Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'] and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

None of the three great apes is considered ancestral to modern man, Homo sapiens, but they remain the only other type of extant primate with which human beings share such close physical characteristics. From them we may learn much concerning the behavior of our earliest primate prototypes, because behavior, unlike bones, teeth, or tools, does not fossilize.

You might recognize me, I'm the fourth guy from the left on the evolutionary chart.

How about Pithecanthropus Erectus? Was it really he who ate the apple? Or was it Homo Pekiniensis?

Man's Place in Nature.

anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.

Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.

I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history-richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation-has propelled me.

I think it's a theory... the theory of evolution and I don't accept it as a theory.

Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.

In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.