Thursday, June 14, 2012

Geological Quote of the Week

This next quote comes from a paper that first illustrated a very famous evolutionary theory called the "Red Queen Hypothesis". This theory stated that two groups of animals evolved together both changing but not changing in relation to one another (i.e. the cheetah and the gazelle both evolving to be faster, although one does not outpace the other). The paper though is very poorly written and apparently the author could not find any place to publish is so he set up his own journal to publish this. The quote comes from the acknowledgements section of the paper.
"I thank the National Science Foundation for regularly rejecting my (honest) grant applications for work on real organisms (cf. Szent-Gyorgyi, 1972), thus forcing me into theoretical work."
Apparently he was a bitter person. You can check out the source of the Red Queen Hypothesis HERE.

You can also check out all of the previous Geological Literature Quotes at my newly redesigned website page.


van Valen, L., 1973, A new evolutionary law: Evolutionary Theory, v. 1, p. 1-30.