Kermit Pattison > Quotes

“Ardi, and the team that discovered her, seemed to be personae non gratae. One of them was even called “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” My curiosity was aroused. Anybody who must not be named certainly must be interviewed.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“One of Ardi's main lessons is that simplistic narratives contrived to fill gaps in the fossil record often turn out to be wrong. Consensus can be a poor predictor of who turns out to be right in science.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Simpson distinguished three modes of evolution: speciation (splitting events), phyletic evolution (gradual change within a lineage), and quantum evolution (sudden “explosive” jumps). He considered phyletic evolution—slow changes in lineages—to be the main driver of evolution.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“AN OLD AMHARIC ADAGE WARNS: HE WHO IS NOT VIGILANTLY SUSPICIOUS will be displaced from this land.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“The great German physicist Max Planck once observed: “New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Natural selection boils down to one question: who produces more surviving offspring? The biology of any creature reflects its mode of reproducing itself. In primates, mate competition manifests itself in body size, canine fangs, female ovulation, and male sperm production”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Slowly the profession began to face the hard truth that the most hated men in paleoanthropology actually might be right about a lot of things.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“The notion of grasslands progressively replacing forests is a myth, and the environmental context of our evolution far more complicated. The savanna saga serves as a reminder of a human foible—trying to describe an entire forest when we can see only a few trees.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Even so, her discovery revealed an evolutionary stage never seen before and demanded a wholesale rethinking of our origins. In their quest, Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and their team crossed paths with most of the major personalities, debates, and discoveries in anthropology over the last half century.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Of course, the crucial difference is that science puts its theories to the test of falsification and adapts to new information.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Gould and Eldredge insisted gradual evolution was insufficient to explain the diversity of life. Raised a Marxist, Gould believed that western scientists were biased in favor of gradualism because it conformed to their bourgeois notions of progress. To Gould and Eldredge, evolution occurred by revolution—bursts of speciation followed by long plateaus of stasis. Their theory became known as “punctuated equilibrium.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Then came evidence beyond the dreams of any anthropologist—bipedal footprints from the time of Lucy’s species. The footprints represented one of the most amazing discoveries in the annals of paleoanthropology, and led the Leakey dynasty into another conflict with a brash young American who threw himself into the excavation—Tim White.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“By contrast, human thighbones angle inward from hip to knee, which helps us balance on one foot when we walk or run. The human femur and tibia form a so-called bicondylar angle—and so did Johanson’s fossil knee. That”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“We can no longer assume that our family, or zoology in general, conforms to any simple model of a single family tree. The tree is not entirely obsolete, but the old, simplistic renderings fail to capture the sheer messiness of lineages that repeatedly split and then rejoin.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Eventually, Johanson could not argue anymore. By December 1977, he agreed with White: it was all one species. The anthropologists ascribed the size differences to sexual dimorphism (males were larger than females) and invoked the anatomical phenomenon of allometry (disproportionate changes in certain parts).”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In 2010, a consortium of scientists revealed a startling discovery: DNA showed modern humans interbred with Neanderthals. Today, all non-African humans contain about 2 percent Neanderthal DNA (roughly equivalent to the amount we would inherit from an ancestor six generations back).”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In recent years, comparative genomics and fossil discoveries have affirmed that the human family once was far more diverse. Modern humans are a paltry remnant of our past variation, and one of the least genetically diverse primate species. For example, just one regional subpopulation of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) has about twice as much genetic variation as all 8 billion humans worldwide.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“He didn’t have time to remove all the rock matrix but had exposed just enough to reveal something very important. As psychologists have demonstrated, the source of expertise is no secret: it is simply the ability to recognize patterns based on years of experience.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“they concluded the human hand remained closer to the primitive proportions and chimp hands had evolved much more.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In the fall of 1978, Kirtlandia carried an announcement of the new species (after interrupting the press run to remove Mary’s name). The journal had small circulation, so the worldwide announcement effectively occurred in January 1979, when Johanson and White published a paper in Science.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In October 1994, eight months after returning from the field, the Middle Awash team published a paper in Nature announcing the new species ramidus, after the Afar word for “root,” ramid.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“By 2002, Gould cast lumpers into a fringe group: “I don’t think that any leading expert would now deny the theme of extensive hominid speciation as a central phenomenon of our phylogeny.” Actually one leading expert did dispute it—Tim White.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“The Laetoli footprints were preserved by a rare combination of circumstances. About 3.6 million years ago, a volcanic eruption blanketed the landscape with ash like new-fallen snow. Rain transformed the ash into muck like wet cement. Into this scene ambled two or three human ancestors who left behind a set of tracks as vivid as footprints on a beach.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In December 1983, security forces in Addis Ababa raided a clandestine meeting and caught an American CIA agent conspiring with Ethiopian dissidents.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In his judgment, the odd anatomy left only one explanation: Ardi was a climber in the trees and a biped on the ground. Against all expectation, he found himself concluding that the evidence of upright walking was even stronger than what the Ardi team had described. A member of the human family? “Hell, yes!” thundered Jungers.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Papers on human evolution were obliged to account for her—the oldest skeleton in the human family, more than one million years older than Lucy. Unfortunately, the ancestor everybody expected wasn’t the one that turned up. Ardi fit no existing category, boggled imaginations, and required a new vocabulary.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“When it comes to terminology, we can pinpoint when and where our genus made its debut—1758 in Sweden. That’s when Carl Linnaeus classified modern humans as Homo sapiens. Beyond that, everything becomes more vague.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“White was an apex predator of his discipline—a man who took to heart the idea that science was an endeavor distinguished by falsification, or putting theories to empirical test. Enemies not only resented him; they fucking hated him. He cared not one bit. “Self-criticism will enhance your science,” White later wrote, “self-esteem will not.” As far as White was concerned, there was a single version of truth.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“The idea of an arboreal-bipedal hybrid seemed as ludicrous as a horse-drawn automobile.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“psychologists have demonstrated, the source of expertise is no secret: it is simply the ability to recognize patterns based on years of experience.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind