Joel Kontinen
Popular magazines and textbooks often use assumed evolutionary lineages as proof of the “fact” of evolution.
Most people know that this fact is not a fact. In his book In Search of Deep Time (Free Press, New York, 1999), Henry Gee, a senior editor of Nature , who has a PhD in palaeontology, wrote:
"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story -- amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."
Darwinian evolution abounds with just-so stories based on assumptions of some kind of upward progression.
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