D. V. Ager Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

It may be said of many palaeontologists, as Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper said recently of 18th century historians: "Their most serious error was to measure the past by the present".

D. V. Ager
Though the theories of plate tectonics now provide us with a modus operandi, they still seem to me to be a periodic phenomenon. Nothing is world-wide, but everything is episodic. In other words, the history of anyone part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.

D. V. Ager
Sedimentation in the past has often been very rapid indeed and very spasmodic. This may be called the "Phenomenon of the Catastrophic Nature of the Stratigraphical Record."

D. V. Ager
Palaeontologists cannot live by uniformitarianism alone. This may be termed the Phenomenon of the Fallibility of the Fossil Record.

D. V. Ager
Changes, cyclic or otherwise, within the solar system or within our galaxy, would seem to be the easy and incontrovertible solution for everything that I have found remarkable in the stratigraphical record.

D. V. Ager
In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudices, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record.

D. V. Ager