Henry Gee

Dr. Henry Ernest Gee (born 24 April 1962 in London, England) is a British paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and senior editor of the scientific journal Nature.

Quotes

• The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.
  • In Search of Deep Time—Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, by Henry Gee, 1999, p. 23.

• To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.
  • In Search of Deep Time—Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, by Henry Gee, pp. 116-117.

• It's evident that Darwin saw evolution not as progressive or improving, but as an activity that happens moment by moment. From this it is clear that evolution has no plan. It has neither memory nor foresight. No vestige of cosmic strivings from some remote beginning; no prospect of revelatory culmination in some transcendent end.
  • The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, by Henry Gee, p. 12