Saturday, November 27, 2010

Geological Literature Quote of the Week

After all of the geology articles I have been reading sometimes I find I come across a quote that is either laugh out loud funny or so ridiculous that I have to pass it on. Well, now this has morphed into my Geological Literature Quote of the Week. Check out previous quotes here:
Archaeoptopig
Whale of a Theory
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To give a little bit of a background, the reason this is the quote for the week is that when reading the abstract I came across the term "preadaptation", at which I shuddered and told my wife "I hate that word". Well then we came to the quote:
"I can often produce a wave of nausea in some evolutionary biologists when I use the word (preadaptation) unless I am quick to say what I mean by it."
Now for those that don't understand, preadaptation gives the connotation of Intelligent Design, in the regards that features were preexisting for a specific trait. Kind of like a bunch of feathers evolving for flight before birds could fly. They were preadapted to flight.

Gould, S. J. and Vrba, E. S. 1982. Exaptation - a missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology. 8:4-15.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No comments:

Post a Comment

Due to the large number of spam comment (i.e. pretty much all of them). I have turned off commenting. If you have any constructive comments you would like to make please direct them at my Twitter handle @Jazinator. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.