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.

I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.

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

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

The meaning that we are seeking in evolution is its meaning to us, to man. The ethics of evolution must be human ethics. It is one of the many unique qualities of man, the new sort of animal, that he is the only ethical animal. The ethical need and its fulfillment are also products of evolution, but they have been produced in man alone.

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

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.