Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::January 28, 2002

Worth repeating

Andrew Knoll, Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University, delivered the inaugural lecture for the 2002 Evolutionary Biology Lecture Series. An excerpt:
“If you read the Origin of Species, you find that Darwin had a very tortured relationship with the geologic record. He devotes two chapters to geology and you might think that, like his intellectual descendants, Darwin would have seen the geologic record and the record of fossil change through time as confirmation of his theories. But in fact he was really troubled by the geologic record for a number of reasons. And the two chapters in the Origin of Species is basically an apology that gets you to believe that the geologic record stinks.
“But it doesn’t stink--Darwin feels he may be in jeopardy. In particular he looks at this pattern of the essentially very rapid appearance of animals as complex as trilobites and says you could really use this as a valid argument against my theories and we really don’t understand this and let me give you an answer. The explanation that Darwin proposes again deals with the inadequacies of the geologic record. Darwin posits that there must have been a time long before the beginning of the Cambrian when there were oceans in which organisms swam or sat still or whatever and that we just don’t have a record of those. Those records were destroyed or deeply buried or otherwise undiscovered.
“So that’s really where Darwin left it, and where people left it for a long time thereafter. The question becomes can we find evidence for the deeper biological record that Darwin requires to make him comfortable and something that really tells us about the deeper history of life.”

--Kim Cretors

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