Donald R. Prothero > Quotes

“I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.”
― Donald R. Prothero

“[N]early every creationist debater will mention the second law of thermodynamics and argue that complex systems like the earth and life cannot evolve, because the second law seems to say that everything in nature is running down and losing energy, not getting more complex. But that's NOT what the second law says; every creationist has heard this but refuses to acknowledge it. The second law only applies to closed systems, like a sealed jar of heated gases that gradually cools down and loses energy. But the earth is not a closed system -- it constantly gets new energy from the sun, and this (through photosynthesis) is what powers life and makes it possible for life to become more complex and evolve. It seems odd that the creationists continue to misuse the second law of thermodynamics when they have been corrected over and over again, but the reason is simple: it sounds impressive to their audience with limited science education, and if a snow job works, you stay with it.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence—evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leech down your trousers and pray.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future

“Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers. Rev. Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution!”
― Donald R. Prothero, Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future

“When historian of science Naomi Oreskes surveyed all peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 in the world’s leading scientific journal, Science, she found that there were 980 supporting the idea of human-induced global warming and none opposing it.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future

“. . . [A] creationist spy named Luther Sunderland snuck into a closed scientific meeting of the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum in 1981 with a hidden tape recorder. . . . My friend, the distinguished paleoichthyologist Colin Patterson of the British Museum in London, was talking about pattern cladism and how he had abandoned many of the assumptions about evolution that he had once held, including the recognition of ancestors in the fossil record. He was now only interested in the simplest hypotheses that were easily tested, such as cladograms. But, of course, taken out of context, it sounds as though Colin doubted that evolution had taken place, yet he said nothing of the sort! Colin was speaking in a kind of "shorthand" that makes sense to the scientists who understand the subtleties of the debate, but mean something entirely different when taken out of context. I was at that meeting and was stunned to read afterward about Sunderland's account of what had happened because I remembered Colin's ideas clearly and could not imagine how they could be misinterpreted. For decades afterward, Colin had to explain over and over again what he had meant, and why he did not doubt the fact that evolution had occurred, only that he no longer accepted a lot of the other assumptions about evolution that Neo-Darwinists had made. Unfortunately, Colin died in 1998 while he was still in his scientific prime, unable to continue fighting these misinterpretations of his ideas that continue to be propagated by the creationists.”
― Donald R. Prothero

“all these arguments of the creationists, as well as the “birds are not dinosaurs” minority like Martin and Feduccia, are now rendered entirely obsolete by an amazing array of new discoveries that have occurred in the past 20 years.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“In Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass, Alice steps through a mirror into a world in which all the rules are backward or reversed, and everything is the opposite of reality. A practicing geologist gets the same sensation when he or she reads about flood geology: the photographs of rocks are the same, and some of the same words are used, but the thinking is entirely alien to this planet.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Creationists frequently taunt scientists by pointing to an image of something as specialized as a frog and saying that there is no way they could imagine a transitional fossil between frogs and other amphibians. But in 2008, a fossil was announced that put this question to rest (Anderson et al. 2008). Formally named Gerobatrachus hottoni, it was dubbed “frogamander” by the press because it had features of both frogs and salamanders (fig. 10.11). It had a long tail and salamander-like body, but its head is short with a rounded snout like that of a frog. It also had the large eyes and large eardrum found in frogs and not salamanders.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“invertebrates make up more than 99 percent of all living animals on earth. In fact, insects alone outnumber all other groups of organisms in total diversity, and among insects, beetles are more diverse with more species than any other group of animals.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“science cannot be subservient to ideology and be forced to compromise the truth in order to please the political leadership.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Throughout the second half of this book, we have documented example after example of transitional forms in everything from microfossils to mollusks to mammals. We could continue to do this for hundreds of pages more, but it wouldn’t really make a difference to the creationists or to those who are confused and misled by them.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“The problem with the creationists’ fascination with the Cambrian explosion is that it’s all wrong! The major groups of invertebrate fossils do not all appear suddenly at the base of the Cambrian but are spaced out over strata spanning 80 million years—hardly an instantaneous “explosion”!”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Thus, from the wild speculation of 1967, Margulis’s idea is now accepted as the best possible explanation of the origin of eukaryotes and organelles. Lynn Margulis has even received the National Medal of Science for her groundbreaking and daringly original ideas.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“If flood geologists were real scientists, they would look at real flood deposits and ask what they should look like. Because they never bother to do this, let’s do it for them.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“From the neo-Darwinian insistence on every gene gradually changing to make a new species, we now realize that only a few key regulatory genes need to change to make a big difference, often in a single generation.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Some Americans brought their religion and their politics into alignment by adjusting their political views to their religious faith. But, surprisingly, more of them adjusted their religion to fit their politics.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Wells (2000) ignores nearly all of them except for one specimen, named “Archaeoraptor,” which was a composite forged out of two real fossils by an unknown Chinese fossil dealer. Smuggled out of China, the specimen was bought and made into a big deal by amateur dinosaur illustrators (and by National Geographic, which wanted to get a scoop without waiting for the specimen to be tested by peer review). As soon as well-trained paleontologists looked at the specimen, they quickly detected that it was a composite of two different specimens put together to enhance its sale price, and the specimen was never even formally published in a peer-reviewed journal. Wells (2000) slanders the entire profession by suggesting that one artful hoax (which was quickly exposed as soon as real paleontologists looked at it) implies that all the fossils from China are faked or that qualified paleontologists are easily suckered by fakes. As the facts of the story show, Wells is wrong on all counts.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“This highly specialized anatomy of the modern forms confuses creationists. They point to the peculiarities of living Latimeria or the specialized fins of some lungfish and argue that they cannot have been ancestors of tetrapods. But once again, they are thinking of ladders when we are talking about branching bushes.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Studies of the fin motion of both coelacanths and lungfish have shown that they move their fins in a “step cycle” similar to the motion of the four limbs of tetrapods. Thus the characteristic leg motion sequence of four-legged animals was already present in lobe fins that never walked on land.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Apparently, to the creationists, lying and deception are lesser sins than accepting evolution, and they are willing to sacrifice their integrity in their crusade against what they believe to be the source of all evils in the world.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“the fossil record of transitional forms is truly amazing, so there is no shortage of fossils that could be called missing links (however erroneous the notion).”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“All humans hunger for an understanding of their origins, so they generate some sort of story to explain those origins. Once that story has been passed from generation to generation, it acquires its own sort of reality or “truth,” and it is important to the members of that culture so that they understand their own role in the world and their relationship to their gods.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Lieberman (2003) showed that rates of evolution during the “Cambrian explosion” are typical of any adaptive radiation in life’s history, whether you look at the Paleocene diversification of the mammals after the nonavian dinosaurs vanished, or even the diversification of humans from their common ancestor with apes 6 million years ago.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“In the Pacific Northwest, famous floras from Alvord Creek in Oregon”
― Donald R. Prothero, After the Dinosaurs: The Age of Mammals

“If the Discovery Institute tells a lie, it does so in order to advance the Truth. Because the Discovery Institute fights for morality, it is above morality. Indeed, the intent of the Discovery Institute is simple enough. Con men are rarely complicated”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“A more concrete example happened in 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Before we deal with the creationist distortions about Archaeopteryx, let us review the evidence that convinced 99 percent of legitimate scientists that birds are dinosaurs.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“We mammal chauvinists like to think of the last 65 million years as the “age of mammals,” but in terms of diversity, the teleosts were evolving far faster than the mammals, and we could easily think of it as the “age of teleosts.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

“Once again, the fossil record has answered them with a perfect transitional fossil (Li et al. 2008) that rebukes them in turn. Officially known as Odontochelys semitestacea, its name literally means “toothed turtle with half a shell.”
― Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters