Henry Gee > Quotes

“No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”
― Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life

“Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.”
― Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life

“Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose.”
― Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life

“But perhaps the single most important factor in the improvement of the human condition over the past century has been the reproductive, political, and social empowerment of women, especially in developing countries. Now that women have increasing government over their own bodies—and more of a say in human affairs—humanity has doubled its workforce, improved its overall energetic efficiency, and cut its population growth.”
― Henry Gee, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters

“Therefore, do not despair. The Earth abides, and life is living yet.”
― Henry Gee, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters

“For if life on Earth was forged in fire, it was hardened in ice.”
― Henry Gee, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters

“E. M. Forster’s famous advice to “Only connect!” is beginning to look superfluous. A theory in which the building blocks of the Universe are mathematical structures—known as graphs—that do nothing but connect has just passed its first experimental test.”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“Whatever the future may hold for Nature, its past—indeed, its very existence—owes much to religious and political discontent. In the nineteenth century, academics at the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge were required to belong to the conventional Church of England. Those barred from these institutions for reasons of religion or politics—Catholics, Jews, atheists, and dissenters of every stripe—washed up, perhaps inevitably, in London, where, in 1828, University College was founded. It was a group of such London-based academics, centered on Thomas Henry Huxley—an early champion of Darwinian evolution—who found themselves with nothing to read. The group, known as the X Club (Ladies’ Night was known as the XYves), had been devotees of a periodical called The Reader. But when that folded, the X Club persuaded Scottish publisher Alexander MacMillan to underwrite a scientific magazine. And so, on November 4, 1869, Nature was born, and the MacMillan family has published it ever since.”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“Except for the cyanobacteria, the ocean’s cacophony of microscopic organisms has followed redwoods, mammoths, and Hallucigenia into extinction. The krill are gone. Krill would be of as little use to people as sharks and seabirds, fish or jellyfish, seashells or whales. They are all gone, too.”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“admitted (on live, prime-time TV, and in rounded Oxford tones) how much he liked Tolkien, and went on to describe in toothsome detail the sadomasochistic sexual cannibalism at the heart of Yeti religion. Postmodernist chatterati were left in agonies of indecision about which solecism was worse.”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“castored chair”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“validity—without divine grace, who would know which was more likely to be correct? Figure 5 In figure 6 I show three of the very large number of possible”
― Henry Gee, The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution