Quotes About Agassiz

The world has arisen in some way or another. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge.

This love of money is the curse of American, and for the sake of it men will sell honor and honesty, till we don't know whom to trust, and it is only a genius like Agassiz who dares to say, 'I cannot waste my time in getting rich,' said Mrs. Jessie sadly.

If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants. Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz

Darwin's mechanism of natural selection and random variation necessarily required a lot of time to generate wholly novel organisms, creating a dilemma that Agassiz was keen to expose.

documenting Darwin's picture of the history of life. If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants.

Agassiz trained an army of able young naturalists who took his method to other universities, and they in turn passed them on to their students, themselves future professors.38

Agassiz concluded that the fossil record, particularly the record of the explosion of Cambrian animal life, posed an insuperable difficulty for Darwin's theory

Darwin's ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin's theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz's closes them.