Scientist Flubs and Flops, #5

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• "The origins of major morphological novelties remain unsolved...No one has satisfactorily demonstrated a mechanism at the population genetic level by which innumerable very small phenotypic changes could accumulate rapidly to produce large changes: a process for the origin of the magnificently improbable from the ineffably trivial." Keith Stewart Thomson,  "Macroevolution: The Morphological Problem"
• "Selection based on survival of the fittest is insufficient for other than microevolution. Realistic probability calculations based on probabilities associated with microevolution are presented. However, macroevolution (required for all speciation events and the complexifications appearing in the Cambrian explosion) are shown to be probabilistically highly implausible (on the order of 10−50) when based on selection by survival of the fittest. We conclude that macroevolution via survival of the fittest is not salvageable by arguments for random genetic drift and other proposed mechanisms...Evolution of a few flowers on a hillside is reasonably explained by mutation and selection; it stretches logic to explain the millions of extremely diverse species seen currently and in the fossil record...Microevolution is probabilistically realistic; macroevolution is not, and this is documented empirically."  -- Olen R. Brown and David A. Hullender, "Neo-Darwinism must Mutate to survive," 2022, (link). 
• "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme."  -- Philosopher of science Karl Popper (link). 
• "In discussions with biologists I met large difficulties when they apply the concept of ‘natural selection’ in a rather wide field, without being able to estimate the probability of the occurrence in a empirically given time of just those events, which have been important for the biological evolution. Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposesiveness. While they pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’, they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle’.” -- Eminent physicist Wolfgang von Pauli, discoverer of the biologically crucial Pauli Exclusion Principle (link).
• “Nowhere in the world has any recognizable trace been found of an animal that would close the considerable structural gap between Hyracotherium and the most likely ancestral order, the Condylarthra. This is true for all of the thirty-two orders of mammals, and in most cases the break in the record is still more striking....The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the most basic ordinal characters and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed." -- George Gaylord Simpson (a leading paleontologist), "Tempo and Mode in Evolution," page 106.
• "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." -- Stephen Jay Gould, a leading paleontologist, "Evolution Now: A Century After Darwin," page 140, 1983. 
• "The published hominin fossil record does not yet have a true intermediate stage between an apelike and a humanlike body." -- Anthropology professor Henry M. McHenry, "Evolution: The First Four Billion Years," page 270. 
• "I have recently come to realize that the assumed evidence for common descent becomes much less convincing the closer you look into the details....According to the most recent and most comprehensive studies, the previous decades of phylogenetic trees, evolutionary scenarios, and reconstructed ancestors (ground plans) would all be utterly incorrect....Evolutionary biology is a state of disarray. Something is clearly and profoundly off the mark and conflicting with any expectations from Darwinian theory. I can only urge my colleagues to stop closing their eyes, only because of world view blinders, and recognize the obvious need for a paradigm change, because we have just scratched the surface of the problems." -- Paleontologist Günter Bechly (link). 
• "The study of human prehistory attracts the most ambitious and, as one member of the discipline put it to me, 'the most psychotic', palaeontologists.... Our direct knowledge of the first few million years of human evolution derives from a collection of bone fragments that could no more than halfway fill a large shoebox....Attempting to reconstruct the history of early humanity from the available evidence is, it has been said, akin to trying to divine the plot of War and Peace from just 13 of its pages, picked at random."  -- Year 2025 article in The Guardian, a materialist-leaning newspaper (link).