Phylogeny Quotes

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase - it's extraordinary.

Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.

The evidence is overwhelming that birds are dinosaurs.

The theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology. The diversity of organisms, similarities and differ- ences between kinds of organisms, patterns of distribution and behavior, adaptation and interaction, all this was merely a bewildering chaos of facts until given meaning by the evolutionary theory.

Ontogeny re-capitulates phylogeny.

The tree of life was always there. Evolution just fills in the gaps.

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld.

The concept of evolution postulates that living organisms have common roots, and in turn, the existence of common features is powerful support for the concept of evolution.

Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.

All mammals undergo a certain degree of diversification. Darwin knew that. When he drew a family tree, it had many branches on it.

I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought - the history of race (phylogeny). Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation... 'ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).

I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,-this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.

The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.

At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.

The study of evolution is an evolution in itself.

Embryology reveals surprising similarities between early embryos of seemingly quite different animals. And it also shows that some structures that may look very different later on have fundamental similarities in the way they form.

In the course of individual development, inherited characters appear, in general, earlier than adaptive ones, and the earlier a certain character appears in ontogeny, the further back must lie in time when it was acquired by its ancestors.

All life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life

Man's body had a different shape in the past from that of the present, and from that which it will have in the future. During involution it was approximately spherical, as it still is during ante-natal life, because the intra-uterine development is a recapitulation of past stages of evolution.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny

The existence of common features in different forms of life indicates some relationship between the different organisms, and according to the concept of evolution, these relations stem from the circumstance that the higher organisms, in the course of millions of years, have gradually evolved from simpler ones.

Child psychology and animal psychology are of relatively slight importance, as compared with the sciences which deal with the corresponding physiological problems of ontogeny and phylogeny.