Henry Gee

Dr. Henry Ernest Gee (born 24 April 1962 in London, England) is a British paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and senior editor of the scientific journal Nature.

Henry Gee in 2008

Quotes

• It's evident that Darwin saw evolution not as progressive or improving, but as an activity that happens moment by moment. From this it is clear that evolution has no plan. It has neither memory nor foresight. No vestige of cosmic strivings from some remote beginning; no prospect of revelatory culmination in some transcendent end.
  • The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (2013) p. 12

In Search of Deep Time (1999)

—Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life by Henry Gee

• The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.
  • p. 23.

• 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.
  • pp. 116-117.

Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct (Nov 30, 2021)

: Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse Scientific American Opinion article by Henry Gee

• There is more genetic variation in a few troupes of wild chimpanzees than in the entire human population. Lack of genetic variation is never good for species survival.

• [O]ver the past few decades, the quality of human sperm has declined massively... Pollution... is one possible factor. Another might be stress... triggered by living in close proximity...

• The cause of extinction is usually a delayed reaction to habitat loss. ...H. sapiens might ...already be a dead species walking.

• [T]he human population is set not just for shrinkage but collapse—and soon. To paraphrase Lehrer, if we are going to write about human extinction, we’d better start writing now.
  • Ref: Tom Lehrer, "So Long Mom (A Song for World War III)" (1965) That Was the Year That Was side two