Niles Eldredge Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

There is presumably an upper limit to the carrying capacity of humans on earth—of the numbers that agriculture can support—and that number is usually estimated at between 13-15 billion, though some people think the ultimate numbers might be much higher.

Niles Eldredge
Thus extinctions, in the abstract consideration of life's entire history, have paved the way for the truly new, including, of course, ourselves. But now that we are here, it is not inconsistent at all to want to see our own species survive. To hell with innovation, let's try to stick around.

Niles Eldredge
I needed to explain why evolution leaves and entirely different sort of pattern in the rock record than Darwin — and his long string of successors, including many paleontologists — had supposed.

Niles Eldredge
As a paleontologist, I readily concede that my long dead fossils, lacking any traces of their soft anatomies or behaviors, are totally mute on the subject of reproduction and transmission of genetic information. And this is, I acknowledge, a major limitation to our data.

Niles Eldredge
Stasis is now abundantly well documented as the preeminent pale ontological pattern in the evolutionary history of species.

Niles Eldredge
CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN stands among the giants of Western thought because he convinced a majority of his peers that all of life shares a single, if complex, history. He taught us that we can understand life's history in purely naturalistic terms, without recourse to the supernatural or divine.

Niles Eldredge
Scientists, being as a rule more or less human beings, passionately stick up for their ideas, their pet theories. It's up to someone else to show you are wrong.

Niles Eldredge
The persistent pattern of no change within samples, coupled with the abrupt appearance of new species — organisms marked with anatomical innovations — had to be telling us something about the way the evolutionary process works.

Niles Eldredge