Most Scientific Problems Are Far Better Understood

Given The Fact Of Evolution, One Would Expect The Fossils To Document A Gradual Steady Change From Ancestral Forms To The Descendants. But This Is Not What The Paleontologist Finds. Instead, He Or She Finds Gaps In Just About Every Phyletic Series.

Isolating Mechanisms Are Biological Properties Of Individuals That Prevent The Interbreeding Of Populations That Are Actually Or Potentially Sympatric.

Every Politician, Clergyman, Educator, Or Physician, In Short, Anyone Dealing With Human Individuals, Is Bound To Make Grave Mistakes If He Ignores These Two Great Truths Of Population Zoology: (1) No Two Individuals Are Alike, And (2) Both Environment And Genetic Endowment Make A Contribution To Nearly Every Trait.

The Issue, As Correctly Emphasized By Carl Sagan, Is The Probability Of The Evolution Of High Intelligence And An Electronic Civilization On An Inhabited World. Once We Have Life (and Almost Surely It Will Be Very Different From Life On Earth), What Is The Probability Of Its Developing A Lineage With High Intelligence? On Earth, Among Millions Of Lineages Of Organisms And Perhaps 50 Billion Speciation Events, Only One Led To High Intelligence; This Makes Me Believe In Its Utter Improbability.

The Major Novelty Of My Theory Was Its Claim That The Most Rapid Evolutionary Change Does Not Occur In Widespread, Populous Species, As Claimed By Most Geneticists, But In Small Founder Populations.