In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life

Book | 1999 | Henry Gee

[martianagent]

The reason for this lies with the scale of geological time that scientists are dealing with, which is so vast that it defies narrative. Fossils, such as the fossils that we hail as our ancestors, constitute primary evidence for the history of life, but each fossil is an infinitesimal dot, lost in the fathomless sea of time, whose relationship with other fossil and organisms living in the present day is obscure.

Nobody has ever observed macroevolution, and believers usually claim this is because of the gigantic time frames involved. The question is which came first, the time frames or Darwinism. Was Darwinism adapted to an existing view of the age of the Earth or were systems for believing in these vast expanses of time created for the benefit of Darwin? There are serious reasons for doubting these kinds of dating systems and the time frames derived from them

[FairWitness]

Linnaeus lacked several hundred thousand fossils that have been dug up since his lifetime, genomes for determining closeness of relationship at the DNA level, and a century of genetic research that studies the rather remarkable structural changes that can result from single mutations. Among other things.

All true in terms of the data available, but I understood the question in terms of method - i.e., what to do with the data - I think that is more of a mathematical/analytical tools thing rather than a raw data thing.

[gore3000]

I thought the "Introduction" worth reproducing here for its emphasis that what is important in biology is understanding "patterns of relationship rather than lines of ancestry"

A very good point. Lines of ancestry is not useful. What we need to examine is how species work, what they can teach us about life and about ourselves. In a way the encyclopedic naturalists before Darwin did much more useful work than those who followed and tried to divine stories of ancestry.