Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes.... Isaiah 5:21
come from us. Fossils are mute; their silence gives us unlimited license to tell their stories for them, which usually take the form of ancestry and descent.... Everything we think we know about the causal relations of events in Deep Time has been invented by us, after the fact."
Henry Gee, Nature 1999, quoted by Tom Bethell, Darwin's House of Cards (2017), p. 29