Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely.

...the argument from absence of transitional types boils down to the striking fact that such types are always lacking unless they have been found.

I have a debt, a loyalty to the museum; the best place for me to do what I wanted to do.

It is obvious that the great majority of humans throughout history have had grossly, even ridiculously, unrealistic concepts of the world. Man is, among many other things, the mistaken animal, the foolish animal. Other species doubtless have much more limited ideas about the world, but what ideas they do have are much less likely to be wrong and are never foolish. White cats do not denigrate black, and dogs do not ask Baal, Jehovah, or other Semitic gods to perform miracles for them.

Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.

It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual completely continuous transitional sequences.

Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.